


let the water take me

by callunavulgari



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Alternate Universe - Mermaid, Childhood Trauma, F/M, Gore, Happy Ending, M/M, Multi, Public Sex, Random OCs - Freeform, Serial Killer Roadtrips, Serial Killers, Sirens, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-14
Updated: 2012-09-14
Packaged: 2017-11-14 04:57:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 22,399
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/511557
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/callunavulgari/pseuds/callunavulgari
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It's a love story, see? There's blood in the water and the sharks are coming. Siren-Serial Killer AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	let the water take me

**Author's Note:**

> Set in a world much like our own, except there are cities called Radiant Garden and Twilight Town, and a special little place named Destiny Islands. If anyone is interested, there's a playlist [here.](http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL59B7C1DE05547FF5) Art masterpost is [here](http://monaps.tumblr.com/post/31531758990/from-a-whole-bunch-of-sketches-i-made-only-mere). Mo has been utterly glorious and needs a shrine built to her for not killing me every time I pestered her. All the love to my lovely betas: tierfal, faorism, and ravewalker. You were all fantastically helpful and I really couldn’t have done this without you. Also, Nick, thank you for putting up with late night discussions about assassins and motivations, drawing that [silly piece of art](http://i1234.photobucket.com/albums/ff410/phantasmik/murderrr-1.jpg), and basically keeping this story going.

When Axel was six, his big brother once sat him down well away from their mother and told him a story.  
  
“It's a love story, Ax,” he told him, laughing when Axel rolled his eyes and made a face. “But it's a special love story, see? One that I want you to remember for a very, _very_ long time.”  
  
He told him of clear ocean water and coral reefs and a girl with eyes as green as seafoam who had given everything she had for the sake of love. “She gave up her family, Axel,” he says, and presses his hand to his breast pocket, right over the photo he always carries with him.  
  
“I want you to remember that when they tell you how evil the merfolk are. I want you to remember this girl and I want you to know that they aren't all bad. That they don't deserve glass prisons and they don't deserve to be the slaves that humans have made them.”  
  
Axel had nodded, watching the dock just past their kitchen window—the wood sun-bleached and bloated—imagining that beyond the brackish yellow-green water of their little cove, he could see the sea that Zack talked about, waters clear blue and stretching past the horizon.  
  
That night, the monsters came, and Axel was the only one left.  
  
.  
  
Before the monsters, things were easy. Things were simple. Axel grew up with his two brothers in a cove just outside of Twilight Town. It was far enough away from the town that you could only get there by train, but close enough that the light pollution leaked out into their little nook of the world, obscuring the stars on all but the clearest of nights.  
  
Zack used to drag him and Reno down to the beach on nights like these, their toes in the surf as Zack pointed out the constellations. Andromeda and Ursas Major and Minor, Piscis Austrinis and Hydra. They lay there until the tides began to come in, creeping up their calves and wetting the ratty ends of their shorts until they were forced either to move farther up the beach or head inside.  
  
A few hundred paces from their house there was a cave that he and Reno liked to explore, playing pirates and sirens—Axel liked playing the pirate, because with a wooden sword in his hand and Reno snarling at his feet, he felt like the king of the world.  
  
Reno always seemed to have other plans, grabbing the sword and telling Axel to look like an evil fish until Axel gave in, snarling and growling and snapping at him from the water as Reno leapt from rock to rock. On days that Axel was feeling particular mischievous, he’d spike his hair up with salt water and shamble around growling “Murrrrrder” until Reno stopped slashing at him and started laughing.  
  
They knew the tides like the backs of their hands, better than they knew anything else in their world. They knew when to leave their cave for fear of getting trapped inside and they knew the best times of day to swim. Reno used to dare him to swim out of the cove, to the first sandbar in the distance, perhaps a mile from their home. The one time that Axel had tried, he’d barely gotten out of the cove before he’d heard his mother shouting. When he’d turned, Zack had been beside her, tiny little figures in the distance that made him feel farther away than he really was. All of a sudden the ocean was foreign, its green waters something to fear—the depths hiding things unknown. The slap of the waves against his skin was cause for panic. He’d squinted, looking for shadows beneath the surface, sure that a mer was hiding there, waiting to gobble him up.  
  
He’d panicked, thrashing, his throat closing up as he watched Zack shout something and dive into the water. The waves knocked him back and forth, bandying him about like a piece of driftwood. He remembers thinking, with a distant kind of horror, that if he survived, he was never going to talk to Reno again. His vision darkened as he tried to breathe around the lump in his throat, and when he finally started to sink, Zack was there, an arm around his waist. When they broke the surface, his eyes were frantic. He shook Axel, screaming his name until he was hoarse, until Axel, horrified when Zack started _crying,_ apologized and starting crying too.  
  
Zack had never let either of them forget that day, and for all that Axel was a great swimmer, he never tried it again.  
  
.  
  
(Years after, when he’s sixteen and angry at the world, when the blood and the guts aren’t enough to placate his rage, he tries it again.  
  
It’s only when he reaches the sandbar that he starts crying, howling his grief to the sea.)  
  
.  
  
Zack took them to Twilight Town when Axel was five. He made the train ride into a grand adventure, pretending that each tunnel they went into was the gaping maw of a monster, telling them that they had to break out again with the power of words.  
  
“It’s magic, you  see,” he’d grinned, laughing when Axel and Reno had started chanting everything from _open_ to _abracadabra._ When they got nearer to the end of the tunnel, light growing ahead of them, Zack would start chanting with them, and when they broke free, they would cheer, Zack gleefully swinging them into the air.  
  
Upon arrival, he bought them sea salt ice cream and showed them around the town. He’d buy a souvenir for each of them, a woven bracelet with mystical properties for Axel and a toy sword for Reno. They’d eat their lunch at the top of the clock tower, looking out over the town and beyond, to the horizon where they could just barely make out the coast.  
  
On the ride back, Axel had fallen asleep to the sounds of his brothers’ voices, his heart warm with contentment.  
  
He never forgot that day, and the bracelet is still worn and soft against his wrist.  
  
.  
  
The day before the monsters come, Zack sits him down with his story, and Axel thinks back to the girl he used to bring around. Aerith with her seafoam green eyes and pink ribbon. Axel remembers how she’d told him stories until he fell asleep when he was three, his mother drunk on the sofa and Zack off dealing with Reno. She had dimples and a voice like palms swaying in the breeze, the whisper of the wind over the water, and when she laughed, it was infectious.  
  
She’d stopped coming over when he was four.  
  
Axel had always wondered what had happened to her, but when he asked Zack, he looked so sad that Axel hadn’t asked again.  
  
.  
  
For as long as he lives, he will never forget that night, the smell of blood and the sound of Zack’s voice, urging him to hide. He remembers asking for Reno, sobbing that it wasn’t right that Reno wasn’t there. He remembers Zack shaking his head, shoving him into the closet and snapping the handle off the door. He’d known better than to yell after his brother, especially after his mother’s shriek had been cut off by a strange gurgle that made him tremble, fisting his hands into Zack’s nicest suits.  
  
He remembers hearing Zack shouting at someone. He remembers hearing the gunshot.  
  
The house had been quiet after that. The screen door had thumped shut, footsteps tromping down their front steps, and the silence had crept in, burning a void into his chest.  
  
It had felt like hours. He’d shaken like a leaf, sobbing until he began to shout for his brothers, for his mother, for _anyone._ After a while his voice had stopped working, reduced to raspy little echoes in the closet until finally that had stopped too.  
  
It was a day and a half before anyone found him, a day after the smell had already started to seep through the crack under the closet door. The smell of bodies festering in the heat of the day, rot and decay so thick that Axel had gagged, burying his nose into Zack’s clothing and collapsing into an exhausted sleep.  
  
If he were being honest, he was lucky that the police had found him. Their cove was private enough that they rarely got visitors, but apparently someone had made a call. Someone who wasn’t Axel or his brothers—someone who wasn’t Axel’s mother.  
  
Axel remembers getting out of the house all too well—the idiot cop who hadn’t thought to cover his eyes until they got to Reno’s corpse, his skin grey and his neck snapped, his eyes staring blankly out at Axel. Reno was nine when he died, but like this, he seemed smaller—tossed brokenly onto the stairs like trash.  
  
Axel had fought the cop, screaming and reaching for his brother until the police chief had stormed over, red-faced, shouting at the officer before wrapping a hand over Axel’s eyes. He’d murmured quietly, talking with him in a soothing voice that made Axel think of Zack.  
  
He doesn’t remember the ride to the hospital and he doesn’t remember the week after it.  
  
The next thing he remembers is the orphanage.  
  
.  
  
When Roxas was six, there was just one story about the humans.  
  
It wasn't a very good story.  
  
A pup he may have been, but it made his mouth water and his teeth ache with the need to rend flesh and splinter bone just the same.  
  
It would be years before he would even be allowed to venture to the surface. Years before he would be permitted to drown and devour his first human.  
  
He grinned at his mother, all teeth, and told her that he couldn't wait.  
  
.  
  
When Sora was born, he was never a very good swimmer.  For any other child of the sea, having a weak fin would have been a death sentence. For Sora, it just meant that he would have trouble catching and keeping his first human—that he might never get that chance—that he would be sentenced to the depths of the ocean, stuck rearing the pups or playing politics with the big fish if he was lucky.  
  
But when Roxas was born a year later, he wouldn’t let his brother settle for that fate. He coached Sora, spending their early years playing games of tag—learning the waters around them and testing Sora’s weaknesses and strengths. Over time, Sora got stronger. Certainly not strong enough to best Roxas, but strong enough that the older mers no longer looked at him with pity. Their mother and father began to discuss the possibility of Sora going to the surface, that maybe he was good enough to entice a human into the deep.  
  
What they don’t know is that Sora _is_ strong enough to get to the surface. That their sons have bested sharks and weaved through schools of jellyfish without being stung. They don’t know that their sons have already been to the surface, and they certainly don’t know that Sora’s already enticed his first humans—just not in the way they’d expect.  
  
But what they don’t know won’t hurt them and Roxas certainly isn’t going to tell them that his brother is a blood traitor. That he consorts with humans and plays with them in the surf as if they were his brethren.  
  
No, Roxas won’t tell them; and if Sora knows what’s good for him, neither will he.  
  
.  
  
The first time, it’s an accident.  
  
Roxas has never been truly worried about his brother’s strength, but Sora has always had a big heart. When he was three, he would cry over the tuna when it came time to feed, and for three years, he ate nothing but kelp.  
  
This is something different. This is something far more ill-advised—something truly dangerous.  
  
The humans are loud. The females shriek when the males throw sand at them, their high, bird-like voices making him think of the wretched shriek of a gull. Sora idles next to him in the surf, watching curiously as one of the smallest girls dips her toes into the waves that roll gently onto the beach. She giggles, red hair flashing in the sunlight, and steps farther out so the water can lap playfully at her ankles. One of the boys comes up behind her, kicking water up at her and soaking the ends of her dress, laughing and taking off when she shrieks in distress. His white hair is strange amongst humans so young. Strange enough that Roxas wonders if he has the blood of their kind coursing through his veins, even if the most minuscule amount. It isn’t unheard of. Rarely do mers fall for humans, but when they do, they fall hard.  
  
There are stories of sirens rescuing humans from shipwrecks—creeping ashore and never looking back, deaf to the call of the sea. They turn their backs on their blood, raise the humans’ pups and pretend they’d been born human.  
  
Unfortunately, the primary cause for mixed blood isn’t always love. Their kind knows the dangers that humans represent—that the most powerful of the humans seek them out, follow his kinsmen through the sea until they have one of them alone, backed into a corner and fighting just to survive. The humans don’t always win. Sometimes they lose, their entrails drifting sadly in the near black water. But when they win...  
  
If the humans do win, their brothers and sisters are never heard from again. Ensnared and carted back to be stuffed into a prison, a mere fish tank, where they would waste away. Years later, more children with mixed blood would make their way to the shoreline, drawn to the sea as their mothers were before them.  
  
Looking at this boy, Roxas wonders whether he was sired through love or force—whether the blood in his veins would be enough to give him a fin in the water or if he’d retain his weak human legs.  
  
“They look so happy,” Sora says, drifting closer—boosting himself up so he can peer over the rock they’ve sheltered themselves behind.  
  
Roxas jerks his brother back, baring his teeth.  
  
“They’re among their own kind, Sora. Of course they’re happy.”  
  
Sora pouts, sinking low enough in the water that the only thing Roxas can see are his unhappy eyes. The sun is warm on Roxas’s shoulders, almost uncomfortably so after nine years confined to the depths of the ocean. Roxas knows that they’ll have to leave soon—that his pale skin can only stand the sun for so long before it starts to redden and sting—that their parents will certainly know where they’ve been if they return with the sun’s kiss on their skin.  
  
“I’m sorry, Sora,” he says. “But you know it’s true. They wouldn’t treat you the same. You know the stories.”  
  
Sora rolls his eyes, slapping his tail against the water irritably. “The stories, of course,” he hisses. “How could I have forgotten?” With one powerful flex of his tail, he’s under the water, probably headed home. Roxas sighs and follows him.  
  
.  
  
Roxas won’t know it until much later, but that night, Sora goes back.  
  
There’s a little girl sitting on the shore, moonlight shining down on her red hair. Her eyes go wide when she sees him and she flinches slightly, letting out a soft squeak of astonishment, her grip tightening on the seashell necklace she’s working on.  
  
“Oh,” she says. “Hello.”  
  
Sora smiles at her, carefully tucking the serrated edges of his teeth out of sight. He’s still young enough that his third row hasn’t grown in, but even one row of fangs is enough to frighten a young human girl. There’s no reason to scare her. That isn’t what this is about. “Hello!” he grins.  
  
Reluctantly, she returns the smile with one of her own.  
  
.  
  
The orphanage wasn’t the best place to spend years six through ten. But then, the Hickman House wasn’t the best place to spend years ten through thirteen. And juvie _definitely_ wasn’t the best place to spend year fourteen.  
  
By the time he’s fifteen, though, he knows his way around. If Zack was alive, he’d call them street smarts. If his mother was, she’d call him a delinquent. Both are true of course.  
  
The first time he really kills someone is when he’s eleven years old.  
  
Alan Hickman isn’t the best person to raise a child. That isn’t to say that _any_ of the Hickmans are fit to raise anything, but Alan is the worst. The fact that he turned the kids that he did look after into killing machines isn’t something that the adoption agencies are aware of, and, for that, Axel isn’t sure if he’s grateful or not.  
  
While most kids are supposed to be worried about fitting in at school or acing their spelling test, Axel is learning how to aim for the heart—the brain—the arteries. He’s learning which pressure points to push and the force required to stop the heart. His adoptive father teaches them how to use bone saws and machetes, how to drain the blood from the body—how to make it look like an accident.  
  
They start out with dummies and targets, and a year after he’s been there, Axel graduates to humans.  
  
The girl that Alan has tied to the chair in the living room isn’t anything special. Brown hair and brown eyes, her skinny body and dirty cheeks telling them more than the way Alan is smirking that she won’t be missed. No one will go looking for her because no one cares.  
  
She’s crying though, big fat tears that ooze their way down her grimy cheeks and soak the gag that Alan’s stuffed into her mouth. She’s scared, whimpering quietly under her breath, and Axel frowns at her while Alan places a gun in his hands. The other kids at Hickman House watch quietly, their presence behind him disconcerting enough that his grip on the gun trembles, his palms sweaty.  
  
He steps closer to her, watching as she shakes, and wonders if his mother had looked like this when her murderers had slit her throat.  
  
He places the gun to her temple, meeting her eyes as she swallows frantically, heart thumping a frenzied staccato in her chest. She whimpers again, twisting in her restraints until the dried blood flakes off and runs red again.  
  
 _I’m sorry,_ he mouths to her, head held high. Her eyes wid—  
  
The gunshot doesn’t make him flinch, but her brains exploding outwards—chucks of bone and hair sliding down his cheek—that does.  
  
The next time he kills, he uses a knife.  
  
He doesn’t like guns.  
  
.  
  
Axel ‘graduates’ from the Hickman House when he turns thirteen—the day after he’s hunted down his own prey. He brings Alan a lock of the boy’s hair, because unlike the rest of the kids, he’s cautious. After Alan has approved the hair, he burns it, letting the breeze take the ashes far away.  
  
By the time he’s fourteen, his kill count is almost the same number.  
  
.  
  
The juvie thing isn’t what you’d think it is.  
  
He gets caught hotwiring a car, and he’s thrown in the place for more than six months.  
  
It’s long enough.  
  
.  
  
When he turns fifteen, he’s offered a job.  
  
At first, he thinks that someone has mistaken him for a whore again. As a fifteen year old boy with dirty skin and ratty clothes, crouched in the shadows of an alleyway, he knows from past experience that far too many people make that mistake. But the man just bends close and offers him a tanned hand, an obviously expensive multifaceted watch glittering up from his wrist.  
  
The man is dressed in a white suit, his face wrinkled and just the right side of jolly. The smile that he offers is warm, but Axel can’t help noticing that it doesn’t reach his eyes. Those eyes are cold, grey as chipped ice and dirty snow.  
  
“I have a job for you, child,” he says, still smiling. Axel glares at him, hunching in on himself and already mapping out how many ways he could kill this man in less than ten seconds.  
  
“I don’t do sex for money,” Axel tells him, baring his teeth.  
  
The man’s smile widens. “Oh no, darling boy. I’m an acquaintance of Mr. Hickman. He’s assured me that your skills are unparalleled among his students and that this job will cater to your particular skill sets quite nicely. So, I’ll ask again—would you like to work for me?”  
  
Axel could kill this man in thirty-three different ways right here.  
  
He smells like steamed cabbage and cigar smoke, and Axel doesn’t trust anyone nowadays.  
  
But he would like to get out of this alley, and if the man knows Alan, than Axel knows exactly what kind of job that the man has in mind.  
  
He doesn’t take the man’s hand.  
  
But he does go with him.  
  
.  
  
The first time that Roxas happens upon them, when they are twelve years old and impossibly naive, he is furious.  
  
It’s for a good reason, of course. If any of their kin had happened upon this scene, things would have been far worse. They would have ostracized Sora, tossing him to the sharks like the fiercest of their criminals. They would watch the bulls rip him apart in silence, grim specters keeping a watchful eye on a fate that none of them, not even the most cutthroat females would have wished on Sora. For mers, there is nothing so evil as betraying one of your own, and for the sake of a human? Although spoken of in hushed voices, it was not something that their kind turned a blind eye to.  
  
Because Sora has _legs._ He laughs with the other children on the beach, running through the sand with a cheerful grin on his face as if he’s just another human, just another of their kind. The sun beats down on his shoulders, and to Roxas’s horror, there is already color there—a light brown with a tinge of red on his formerly pale skin.  
  
They’ve fashioned some sort of toga around Sora’s waist to preserve his modesty, one that he occasionally hitches up with one hand as he chases after the others, laughing and calling out playful curses.  
  
Roxas watches, his vision gone red with rage, and he waits.  
  
Roxas is a creature of the sea, through and through. He is a siren, a monster of the deep. He is mer just as surely as the sea is blue. He has old blood in his veins, same as Sora, but he knows how to use it. A proper mer, with scales of blue and gold gone dry at his wrist—venomous spikes jutting out from the small of his back, creeping down his tail in jagged patterns, waiting to be used as a weapon.  
  
Roxas knows the seductive whisper of the sea and how to imitate its call. His teeth itch with the thought of rending flesh from bone, all three rows of them crowding the cavern of his mouth, making his jaw pop.  
  
He is siren, catao, muirruhgach, and ningyo. He is the sea and the sea is him.  
  
Roxas knows how to wait.  
  
He strikes when the chattering children venture close to the shore, Sora in tow. His brother is still laughing as Roxas explodes out of the water, all three rows of teeth exposed in a snarl that sends the other children scattering in all directions, screaming at the top of their lungs. Sora himself goes pale for a few moments before he snarls back, silver and blue scales creeping across the back of his neck, his posture going defensive. He hisses, placing himself between the humans and Roxas even as he starts the shift mid-run, scales appearing along his lower torso, sharp spines extending from his forearms.  
  
He leaps, and by the time he’s tackled Roxas back into the water, the shift is complete—Sora is just a streak of blue and silver in the cloud of seafoam that knocks Roxas back beneath the waves. With one flex of his tail, Sora has propelled them far enough from the shore that the humans cannot see them, just the churning of water and perhaps the flash of blood.  
  
But Roxas has always been the fighter, for all that he’s taught Sora; and though they fight viciously, it’s no time at all before Roxas has Sora pinned to the sand, a golden spine pressed to the line of Sora’s throat as his brother thrashes and bellows.  
  
Roxas gnashes his teeth, snarling in his brother’s face until Sora goes quiet and unhappy, limp against the sand.  
  
When he finally speaks, it’s almost enough to send Roxas into another rage.  
  
“Please don’t hurt them,” he whispers. “Please.”  
  
Roxas looks at him, appalled, before it becomes too much—disgust curdling bile in the back of his throat as he leaves Sora in the sand, blood on his neck and skin stained with the touch of the sun.  
  
.  
  
(A year later, this will be what Roxas remembers when the humans tug him from the water.  
  
“Please don’t hurt him,” he’ll whisper, knowing that while they laugh at his wish, they won’t pursue Sora.  
  
After all, while two would be a lovely catch, they only need one.)  
  
.  
  
Despite his initial rage, he doesn’t tell their clan about Sora’s betrayal.  
  
For weeks, all his brother’s attempts at conversation are met with silence. He doesn’t know what lie Sora has told the elders to explain away the tint to his skin, but no one says anything.  
  
Roxas doesn’t say anything.  
  
It’s only when Sora stops trying that Roxas forgives him, curling up with Sora for sleep the way they did when they were pups—wrapped so thoroughly around each other that it would seem like they were one creature of silver, gold, and blue.  
  
Sora shakes in his arms, murmuring apologies into his skin.  
  
The following morning, Roxas suggests they take a trip to the surface.  
  
.  
  
Kairi’s a nice girl, for a human. The boy, Riku, has only furthered Roxas’s suspicions of having blood of the sea. He’s far more jealous than the average human, hoarding his friendships close and not reacting well when they’re threatened. Sora tells him that, for days, he’d treated Sora strangely—that he’d bared his teeth at Sora like a threatened female protecting her pups. Then, one day, he’d settled—accepting Sora’s presence amongst his little pack of humans, even going so far as to wade out into the waves to greet him with an outstretched hand and a smile on his face.  
  
Riku never accepts Roxas.  
  
He doesn’t get a chance to.  
  
.  
  
The first sign that something is wrong is the silence. The fish are rarely silent—their voices carry through the water, cheerful and tinny, giggling if he gets close enough to tickle their scales. They speak to each other, small talk that Roxas used to sit and listen to when he was younger, laying on his belly on the ocean floor, watching them weave in and out of the coral reefs. They are only ever silent amongst predators, and this has Roxas on guard the moment he notices.  
  
What’s worse is the lack of whale song, their songs muted by a threat that lurks beyond the shadows.  
  
He hurries to where Sora should be waiting so they can go ashore.  
  
Coming around an outcropping of rock, all he can see is the thrashing—the net, and Sora inside it, desperate, surrounded on all sides by humans with weapons, knives that they jab through the netting, seeming amused by the blood that blooms in the water. Already there is a fine red mist, and Roxas snarls, leaping into the fray and ripping the throat out of the first human he comes across, one of his teeth snagging on the edge of the human’s wetsuit and ripping free of his gums. He isn’t concerned—after all, he’ll just grow a new one to replace it.  
  
The man’s blood spills around them freely, mixing with the Sora’s in a thick red cloud. The other humans panic, and he takes two more down before they realize what is happening, their guts drifting in the water, clouds of red blooming in their wake. The fourth human is cleverer though, putting Sora between them as Roxas hisses his displeasure.  
  
Then the net creaks to life, dragging Sora up and toward the surface. Abruptly, Roxas’s panic returns, and he tears desperately at the ropes for the precious few seconds that the human needs to get to him. The blow lands against his temple, harder than he’d anticipated, and for a few moments he drifts in the water, dazed from the blow as Sora shrieks above him, calling his name.  
  
When he shakes his head clear, Sora is still climbing, too panicked and entangled to use the blades along his forearms to slice through the net. But that’s what Roxas does, sawing through rope until there’s a hole wide enough for Sora to wriggle through.  
  
“Go!” Roxas shrieks, pushing Sora away from him, towards home. There are more humans dropping into the water, these with spears and harpoons clutched in their hands. Sora gives him one last fleeting look, their eyes meeting before he spins, propelling himself into the darker waters of the deep. Roxas readies himself to follow him, snarling one last time at the divers closing in—  
  
The blow strikes him in the back of the head, harder than the first, and Roxas drags in water, deep breath—breathe. His gills ache with the effort, so naturally, that’s where the human strikes next.  
  
The last glimpse he has of his brother is just a flicker of silver and blue vanishing into the deep.  
  
His vision goes dark.  
  
.  
  
Roxas wakes up just once on deck, the sun beating unforgivably down on his shoulders, his scales uncomfortably dry, itchy. His wrists are bound in chains, his tail wrapped in steel, and he takes one breath to tell them to leave his brother be, please, _please_ —  
  
They laugh at him and, in a last ditch effort, his instincts screaming at him, he tries to reach for the last weapon that his kind has against humans.  
  
A single note of siren song makes it past his lips before he is bludgeoned again, the world going dark once more.  
  
.  
  
The next time he wakes, he’s surrounded on all sides by glass walls.  
  
.  
  
Madness isn’t something that just happens. It grows, festering deep within as the years go by. For some, it’s imprisonment. For others, it’s blood and guts and too many small children with their parents slaughtered on the floor before them.  
  
Madness grows and changes, and with it, so do you.  
  
Axel and Roxas are no exception.  
  
They didn’t start off mad, though the spark was surely there. Sometimes, it starts as children tearing off the limbs of animals, morbidly curious as to what goes on beneath their skins. Some just like to cause pain. Others want to be remembered.  
  
And others want revenge.  
  
Sometimes, a match is struck, and the spark catches.  
  
The madness grows.  
  
.  
  
The girl is on the short side—short dark hair and green eyes that peer at him curiously over the frames of her glasses. She’s thin, though Axel can tell that there’s muscle to that skinny frame. He wonders if her father had made her take martial arts, and if so, which art form she learned. Judo, perhaps? Ninjitsu? Perhaps she’s familiar with several forms and is just waiting to kick his ass from here to kingdom come.  
  
But then again, she could just be a normal girl, though Axel very much doubts that. Over the years he’s come to realize that the children of wealthy or powerful people tend to know how to throw a mean right-hook, and, male or female, they almost always give him a bloody nose before the night is up. Once, he’d had a ninety-pound thirteen-year-old knock him out for nearly ten minutes, and he’d just barely managed to scramble away before the police arrived.  
  
So he knows enough to be wary around the children of the rich—enough that even sitting in a moderately upscale bar, he’s got three different guns and seven knives, as well as a garrote threaded carefully into the loose braid keeping his hair away from his shoulders. He likes braiding his hair for murders or kidnappings. Outclassed victims always tend to go for the hair when there are no other options, and the fact that there’s less of a chance of leaving a hair at a crime scene is just another plus.  
  
He drums his fingers on the carefully polished wood and idly wonders what they would do if he behaved like the drunk you never saw at places like this—if he slurred his words and tilted in his chair, maybe spilling a drink or two with flailing limbs. Probably kick him out, and that would be counterproductive to the reason he’s sitting here in a suit, pretending to be interested in the little girl of a billionaire.  
  
Honestly, he finds kidnappings boring. It’s far simpler just to deal with the blood and guts than it is to deal with a pissed off, terrified human being. He enjoys his job as much as anyone does—it’s just what he does. Kidnapping heiresses or heirs for blackmail is only interesting so many times, and considering the frequency of knees to the groin on jobs like this, he’s inclined to find them distasteful.  
  
The girl sends him a small smile, a dainty hand uncurling from the stem of her wineglass to beckon him over.  
  
He holds back a sigh even as he grins back and makes a show of looking behind him. When he turns back to tap a finger to his chest and mouth ‘me?’ across the bar, she’s giggling, her quiet demeanor sloughing away from her now that she thinks she’s found a body to warm her bed with.  
  
He tosses his drink back in one go and goes to cross the room.  
  
By the end of the night, he’ll have a new scratch down his neck and she’ll be tied up in his hotel room’s bathtub.  
  
Boring.  
  
.  
  
Axel’s boss doesn’t trust him enough to let him into the house until Axel is twenty-two years old, and even then he’s forbidden from entering certain areas. He’s intimately acquainted with the sitting room, where he and Mr. Rose discuss his latest assignments and the threat levels of any future kills. Axel takes tea with him there, and, once, he’s even allowed into the dining room, where he has an enormously awkward dinner with Alan and Mr. Rose. The dinner conversation is stimulating though. It isn’t every day that you discuss various methods of murder over pot roast.  
  
It isn’t until he’s twenty-five that Mr. Rose trusts him enough to bring the living targets straight back to the mansion, hauling them out of the trunk of his car and through the various rooms.  
  
Mostly, though, he’s there to receive payments, nothing more, nothing less.  
  
And so doesn’t see Mr. Rose’s pet until then, when he’s finally allowed into the rest of the house.  
  
The tank starts in the hallway. The entire left side of the wall is an endless stretch of glass, the water beyond the glass giving the hallway a surreal, underwater feel. From what Axel can tell upon his first glance, the tank is empty, just thousands of pounds of coral and underwater plants, kelp waving lazily up from the floor. It’s a cool design, of course, and Axel grows to appreciate it more when the hallway lets out into a room with cathedral ceilings that appears to be a library. A few desks stand in the center of the room, and all the walls save one are lined with books, floor to ceiling. That last wall, though, is what has his attention—same as the hallway only massive, making Axel think that the tank at the center of the house must be huge, bigger than the main displays at most aquariums.  
  
He eyes it appreciatively for a few seconds, collapsing into a plush wine-red armchair next to it. There must be some form of window above the tank, because sunlight filters through the water, particles drifting along, lit up like fireflies. It’s a colorful spectacle, and he wonders how much it cost his employer to relocate such mass quantities of coral here. It’s clear that none of the materials inside the tank are fake; but then, his boss has never done anything half way.  
  
He’s about to turn away when out of the corner of his eye he sees a pale hand creeping around the edge of an outcropping of rock. He stares, astonished, as the hand becomes an arm flecked with scales of blue and gold, jagged spines protruding from the forearm, which look like they could slice through bone as easily as butter. Then he’s looking into blue eyes a few shades darker than the scales creeping up the side of the neck to meld with the jutted, pointed things where its ears would be. The strange spine-like protuberances look more like the much larger fins along its forearms than they do like ears, but it’s clear that’s what they are, because one twitches towards Axel as if it can hear him.  
  
The creature’s hair is golden, more human than Axel would have thought, floating about its head like a halo. It peers at him curiously, head cocked to one side before it slowly emerges from its hiding place.  
  
Its torso is human enough, pale as its hands and face. From the belly down is where the transition occurs, the pale human flesh giving way to more of the blue and gold stripes. They streak across the underbelly of its tail in vibrant bursts, bright as the tropical fish that his mother used to keep in their fish tank back home. Enormous spines jut from its back, longer than the creature is tall, starting just above the swell of its rear and ending somewhere in the middle of its long, serpentine tail. The fins are a darker blue; the two large dorsal fins at its hips are colored in gold at the base, striped with various shades of blue and with thin bands of gold that fade almost into black at the very tips. A slightly smaller, translucent fin begins further down the tail, just below the end of the spines, the coloration similar to the fin at the end that twitches with every movement.  
  
Axel almost doesn’t realize that he’s staring until the creature is right in front of him, its hands pressed against Axel’s through the glass.  
  
He can’t break eye contact with it—with this _boy_. He stares and stares and imagines that he can feel the texture of the kid’s hand against his, that there isn’t a barrier between them, cool under his touch.

 

  
He knows enough about sirens to know that they’re dangerous—that this feeling is probably the boy just wrapping him around his little finger. He wonders if the tank is soundproofed—surely Mr. Rose had ensured it. There is no way he’d let a siren sing him to sleep, knowing damn well that he might wake up with its fingers in his guts, the keys of its release clutched in his own hands.  
  
And then, the creature smiles at him, its hand curling into a fist against the glass before it swims back to its shelter, leaving Axel feeling oddly bereft.  
  
Moments later, the front door slams and Axel shakes himself out of it. His mark is already tied to a chair in the sitting room, so he might as well go receive his payment.  
  
With one last look at the tank, he goes to meet his boss.  
  
Blue eyes watch him go.  
  
.  
  
It continues like that. Every time he goes to drop off a mark or to collect a payment, he looks for the creature. Sometimes the boy meets him at the entrance, creeping over to the glass and following him down the hallway, eyes never moving from his. Other times Axel doesn’t see him until he’s really looking, when he’s pattering around the library, peering closely at the tank like they’re playing a game of I Spy.  
  
Sometimes the creature tries to sing to Axel, a smile on his face as faint notes make their way past the glass. It’s the faintest of sounds, a hum that only someone knowing what they were looking for could recognize, but it had been enough for Axel to laugh and attempt to sing back.  
  
It becomes a routine, cooing out a greeting to the glass whenever he’s passing through the mansion, even if the boy isn’t in the immediate vicinity. Axel talks to him sometimes—about his jobs and his apartment. He tells him about Thai food and introduces him to classic rock, something at which the siren wrinkles his nose at when Axel presses his headphones to the glass.  
  
He doesn’t know what draws him to the boy, only that something does—something that makes his heart stutter uncomfortably in his chest.  
  
One day when he’s reading in the plush arm chair next to the tank, the creature floating serenely next to him as if it’s trying to read over his shoulder, his boss gets home early. It doesn’t occur to Axel that he should be concerned with the slamming of the front door. Mr. Rose knows that Axel knows his way around the house and hasn’t seemed to mind thus far.  
  
But the most he’s ever said about his pet was a brief comment he made when they were in the hallway, Axel back from his most recent kill. They’d both settled in the library, talking quietly, before his employer had noticed Axel’s attention on the tank.  
  
“Elusive creatures, sirens,” he’d smiled, gesturing to the seemingly empty tank. Axel had nodded, because it was what was expected of him.  
  
“Seems so, sir,” he’d said, and that had been the end of it.  
  
Now, when Mr. Rose walks into the room, rubbing the back of his neck and yawning, Axel is suddenly very aware of the mer against the glass beside him, cooing faintly at an illustration of the night sky.  
  
Mr. Rose stops the moment he sees the creature, hand raised in greeting, frozen there. Slowly, he raises an eyebrow and creeps closer, watching as the boy mouths words against the glass, repeating the story to himself as he reads.  
  
“I’ve never seen him like that,” Mr. Rose breathes. Just like that, the mer stiffens, turning to snarl in Mr. Rose’s direction before flinging himself back into the bowels of his tank. Mr. Rose watches the bubbles dissipate in the creature’s wake before turning to Axel. His pudgy face is crinkled up in bewilderment, and, for just a moment, Axel wonders how often that look of grudging confusion passes across his face.  
  
“Yeah,” is all Axel says, because he’s still not too sure how he’s supposed to react to the fact that there’s a fish-like humanoid in his boss’s huge-ass aquarium. He leaves the book on his lap, reading the same line over and over again ( _The bells began to ring in the great white building, and a number of young girls came out into the garden_ — _the bells_ — _)_ , trying to appear nonchalant. There’s a speck of something on the carpet—dirt or ash, right next to Mr. Rose’s shiny black loafers.  
  
“How?”  
  
Axel glances away from the carpet, gently folding the book closed. There’s about fifteen ways he can answer that question starting from “Well, when a man and a fishie love each other very much—” and ending with a knife through his boss’s throat, and he’s pretty sure that Mr. Rose isn’t going to appreciate most of them. He settles with a shrug of his shoulders and a quiet murmur. “I don’t know,” he says simply, because it is kind of the truth. He doesn’t know why the kid’s taken to him so well.  
  
Mr. Rose straightens, leaning back from the glass to peer at Axel. “I want to show you something,” he whispers, and he promptly does an about-face and marches over to a door that Axel’s never seen before.  
  
Well, shit.  
  
.  
  
 _Shit_ indeed. Behind the door is an old, creaky staircase that’s somewhere between ‘Oh god, oh god, the poltergeist is going to eat me’ and ‘There’s an axe murderer up here and I’m probably never coming down again’ on the creepy scale. When his boss asks him to bring the latest mark with them—a boy probably not even out of his twenties who has somehow made it onto Mr. Rose’s list of people he wants to see disappear—the strange, slightly unsettled feeling in his gut just worsens.  
  
Since Axel doesn’t get paid to ask questions, he does as he’s told—swinging the surprisingly heavy twenty-something over his shoulder and following his boss up the creepy stairway of doom.  
  
Turns out that the creepy staircase lets out into an even creepier attic, and that creepy attic lets out into a round, vaguely circular room that’s all white walls and eerie lighting. The floor’s what really gets you though. It’s glass—all of it, looking down into the tank itself, waves slapping against the sides. The water casts a blue glow on the walls, creating waving reflections around the room and giving it more of an underwater feel than the hallway. In the center of the room, there’s a section of floor where the glass is cut away, steel bars the only thing separating them from the water.  
  
“I know you’ve been wondering what I do with them,” Mr. Rose says, grinning eerily as shadows chase their way across his face. “After all,” he purrs, kneeling down to touch the tip of his finger to the water. “I hired you to dispose of the bodies, so what would I want with the living ones?”  
  
He beckons Axel closer, and the grin eases into a smile when Axel obeys. “See, this is what I like about you. You don’t ask questions; you just _obey_.”  
  
The steel bars are set into a door that hisses as it opens, and suddenly there’s movement from below—a flick of a fin, maybe.  
  
“You seem to like him,” Mr. Rose says, motioning for Axel to position himself just before the opening. “The siren, that is. Foul creatures, but they’re occasionally useful. Nice to have on hand in a situation like this. Now, see, normally there would be more of a show. Secrets to tell, after all, and there’s nothing like a hungry monster to get your enemies talking.”  
  
Axel can see the siren’s eyes now, blue and haunting, gazing up at them from a halo of kelp. “But this is more important, because sure, you think he’s pretty now? Just wait until you see the way he eats.”  
  
He grins, motioning for Axel to drop the kid into the water.  
  
Axel’s limbs are like lead—the boy child tossed over his shoulder suddenly a huge weight. This kid is probably somebody’s brother—someone’s husband. He has _family_ waiting for him somewhere, and they’re always going to wonder why he didn’t come home. Why he went to the grocery store and didn’t come back. They won’t know that the guy had met Axel in the dairy section—that Axel had laughed with him over skim milk versus soy for ten minutes before Axel had smirked and invited him shyly back to his place. They won’t know that Axel had smacked him over the head with a baseball bat the second they’d gotten through the door of Axel’s apartment, or that he’d ended up here, fish food for a rich man’s exotic pet.  
  
Axel lets the body fall.  
  
The boy wakes when he hits the surface of the water, flailing for a moment before muscle memory kicks in and he remembers how to swim. When he notices them standing above him, he chokes on a dry sob. Maybe he recognizes Mr. Rose, Axel thinks. Or maybe he just remembers being enticed back to a strange man’s apartment on the unspoken pretence of sex and has put two and two together now that he’s woken up in a pool of water.  
  
He pleads with Mr. Rose, and when that doesn’t seem to work, he moves on to Axel, sobbing and dragging his fingers against the side of Axel’s boots. They slip, sliding against the glass, and the panic starts to set in. He thrashes, screaming obscenities and never once looking down, where the siren is approaching him, eyes intent on his prey.  
  
Then, it strikes.  
  
Axel has a fraction of a second to process the shark’s teeth—how the rows of teeth warp and twist the creature’s features into one of the bogeyman myths that they all know—before those teeth are ripping into the boy’s flesh, shaking him like a rag doll as he screams. The siren drags the boy under, deeper and deeper until the kid can’t hook his fingers onto the edge of the glass anymore, until the bubbles slowly stop, the boy going limp in the creature’s grasp.  
  
There’s blood in the water, and it’s the most beautiful thing Axel has ever seen.  
  
.  
  
The next day, he takes those stairs again—goes back to that white underwater room and the creature that lurks within. He presses his belly to the cool glass, laying with his head just above the bars of the siren’s cage. He’s unsurprised when the boy surfaces before him, head cocked and curious.  
  
“What’s your name?” he whispers, reaching a hand out to stroke a few golden strands of hair out of the boy’s eyes.  
  
The boy grins ferally, and Axel thinks that he should be afraid, because the kid hasn’t checked his teeth—hasn’t made the switch from rows of shark-like teeth back to the familiar human ones. But it’s a real smile, Axel knows. The kid’s happy he asked—not about to eat him.  
  
“My name’s Roxas,” he whispers back, his voice like the tide rushing in over the sand—like a storm about to make landfall.  
  
Axel grins back. “Mine’s Axel,” he says. “Got it memorized?”  
  
.  
  
They try starving him at first. When it becomes apparent that he doesn’t care, that he would rather starve to death than become some pretty fish for the human to use in his power games, they introduce fish to his prison. Roxas ignores them at first, content with this death. If he can’t rip the fucker’s throat out with his teeth, than he can at least have the satisfaction of not giving the asshole what he wants.  
  
Then they start introducing electric rods to the water.  
  
After that, he starts eating, albeit reluctantly.  
  
It becomes routine. When the fish stop coming, Roxas knows that they’re about to give him a human.  
  
The first time it happens, he watches the man get tortured for his secrets—dangling over Roxas’s prison by a rope wound tight around his wrists. He wails out the information that the humans want to know, staring down at Roxas with horrified eyes.When they finally give in and drop him, Roxas ignores him. He retreats to the farthest corner of his prison and crouches amongst the coral, watching the human flail, water churning white like a mer pup stuck in the jaws of a shark.  
  
He ignores the human until they touch the rod to the water. The resulting electrical current that courses through his veins leaves him panting, curled in upon himself until he reluctantly pushes off the fake sand and goes to tear the twitching human apart.  
  
So the routine goes on.  
  
He accumulates a pile of human bones in one corner of his prison, and the next time they bring a human to him, he relishes in the blood he spills—the pained noises it makes as he strips the flesh from its bones.  
  
Most of the time, he hides. Despite the largeness of the prison, it’s minuscule compared to his home. The water doesn’t taste the same, and he doesn’t like the way the human stares at him when he’s visible, a smarmy grin stretching his fat face wide.  
  
So he hides amongst the kelp and the coral, and wonders how his brother is doing without him.  
  
.  
  
When he meets Axel, everything changes.  
  
Of course he’s wary at first, but mostly, he’s fascinated. The man’s hair looks like fire—the color reminding him of Kairi, Sora’s little lost human love on the shores of Destiny Islands. But the fact that the man _feels_ different is what tempts Roxas to drift closer and closer, until he’s tucked up against the barrier separating them, his hands pressed directly over the human’s.  
  
Axel is different. He greets Roxas with a wave of his hand and a smile even when there’s a bleeding human tossed over his shoulder like a sack of rotten meat. He hums songs with his face pushed up against the glass, condensation blurring his image whenever he breathes, and the vibrations of the notes against the glass are just loud enough that Roxas can hear him.  
  
It’s nice. He reads silly stories with his back turned to Roxas so that Roxas can read along with him. He smiles and laughs and plays hide-and-seek.  
  
Roxas likes him. He’s the first human that Roxas hasn’t felt like devouring.  
  
And really, that should have been enough warning.  
  
The day that the human holding him captive brings Axel to a feeding, Roxas thinks that this will be the end of it. He hides in the kelp, panic choking its way up his throat as the fucker speaks to Axel—as he opens up the door. It’s the first time that he’s done so without the presence of armed guards, and Roxas knows that this could be it—that he could escape like this, with just Axel and the asshole between him and freedom. The idea falls apart when he realizes that even if he did kill them both, he’d be trapped—without a way to navigate the human world and find his way back to the sea. He turns his gaze onto the body draped over Axel’s shoulder instead, glaring at it resentfully.  
  
He could ignore the body. Maybe Axel wouldn’t leave if he left it alone, to float in the water until it either drowned or was pulled out.  
  
But no, they would surely use the rod—and the idea of Axel seeing him like that, curled up and trembling on the floor, _weak,_ is worse than Axel being frightened away.  
  
He’s still deciding when the human is thrown in, when it wakes and shrieks loudly enough that Roxas would rather eat him just to drown out the noise. It’s only when the wailing thing touches its hands to Axel’s feet that he makes up his mind, darting in quickly and trying for as much blood as possible. He doesn’t know why he doesn’t want Axel seeing him like this, just that he doesn’t. So he drags his prey to the bottom of his tank and eats, feeling Axel’s eyes on him all the while.  
  
.  
  
The next day, Axel approaches him once more, not shying away once when Roxas pushes his way to the surface and forgets to hide his true teeth away. He smiles at Roxas and asks him his name, touching the tips of his fingers to the skin above Roxas’s brow.  
  
Names have power, his mother used to tell him.  
  
He gives his away freely, and gets another back in return.  
  
.  
  
The next time he sees Axel, he introduces him to a sweet substance that he calls chocolate. When he presses a piece of the candy to Roxas’s lips, the pad of his thumb snags on one of Roxas’s teeth. The sweet itself makes Roxas wrinkle his nose with distaste, but the blood—the blood is sweeter than any he’s ever tasted.  
  
Axel laughs at him.  
  
.  
  
Roxas isn’t a bad kid. Sure, he’s got teeth that could tear lesser men in half, but he’s actually pretty cool. Which is why Axel retreats to the room atop his prison the day that he inadvertently gets a six-year-old and his twelve-year-old brother killed on a job that was meant for the parents. He chain-smokes six cigarettes before Roxas surfaces, already crinkling his nose at the smell.  
  
“What _is_ that?” he hisses, grasping the bars in order to keep his head above water. Just the tips of his weird ear fins poke out of the cage, twitching when Axel laughs at him.  
  
“It’s death, kid,” Axel says, offering it to Roxas with a sad grin.  
  
Roxas raises an eyebrow, blinking slowly before taking it.  
  
The slow, cautious puff he takes would be funny if the coughing fit he has afterwards didn’t cause him both to drop the cigarette to float forlornly on the surface of the water and to retreat into a bed of kelp for half an hour.  
  
When he comes back up, he’s glaring, baring his teeth at the cigarette that Axel’s already tucked between his lips. “That _is_ death,” he growls.  
  
Axel shrugs. “You get used to it. It’s a great way to pretend that you’re coping with something that you don’t want to deal with.”  
  
Roxas gives him a look. “And what exactly don’t you want to deal with?” he asks, tail idly churning the waters below him. It makes the small waves slap against the bottom of the glass, and for the first time since Axel was sixteen, he wants to go home.  
  
“Just... stuff,” he responds, not wanting to get into his guilt issues. This is a creature that feels no compunctions about drowning other humans, so, somehow, Axel doubts he’d understand.  
  
“Yes, you were fabulous at explaining yourself there, Ax. Really, well-done.”  
  
Axel knew he should never have introduced the kid to sarcasm.  
  
He tenses up, taking a deep drag of his cigarette before sighing and drawing his knees up to his chin. “Have you ever... done something that you weren’t proud of? Something that you wish you could change, but know that you can’t?”  
  
“Feeling a little guilty?” Roxas asks, drumming his fingers against the glass.  
  
Axel nods jerkily, keeping his gaze locked onto the pink tendrils of an anemone waving lazily at the bottom of the tank. Roxas lets the silence drift for a moment before thrusting his hand out for the cigarette. This hit goes down easier, and when Roxas hands it back, it’s ever so slightly wet. Axel takes another drag.  
  
“What I figure,” Roxas says after a moment, “is that guilt is just another way to guide you in the right direction. It belongs to creatures with far more moral qualms than I, and, as such, I tend to not concern myself with it. The people of the sea are driven by instinct—we do what we have to in order to survive. Guilt is a human dilemma.”  
  
Axel looks at Roxas, with his golden hair slowly drying against his brow, and wonders just how different the mers are.  
  
He chuckles and takes another drag off the cigarette—watches the ember flare in Roxas’s pupils.  
  
“Yeah,” he says. “I suppose it is.”  
  
Instinct had nothing to do with killing those kids, except maybe that the job was born of the instinct to keep a roof over his head and food on his table. He stubs the cigarette out, ignoring the knowing look Roxas sends him.

 

  
  
.  
  
The next time Axel visits, he brings jerky. It tastes atrocious, and Roxas tells him so.  
  
“Meat is so much better fresh,” he grumbles, watching Axel tear a piece off with his teeth.  
  
After Axel leaves, he chases the taste out of his mouth with the forty-year-old man that the human throws into his cell.  
  
.  
  
Roxas hums sometimes when he visits, quietly enough that the sound doesn’t make Axel want to throw himself into the deep. He thinks that Roxas does this on purpose, but then, what the hell does he know about Roxas’s motives?  
  
So Roxas hums a few bars of a familiar Beatles song, and Axel sings along with him about how all they need is love.  
  
After a few moments, Roxas stops humming to scoff at him. “Your singing is terrible,” he says, the syllables carrying the weight of a storm. When Axel just rolls his eyes, Roxas grins playfully, his own eyes sliding closed. He sings serenely, quiet and haunting, and only stops when Axel’s pupils dilate with want, the bars of his friend’s prison digging cruelly into his palms as he tries to wrench open the doors. They don’t budge, of course. The shiny new padlock guarantees it.  
  
Roxas cuts himself off halfway through the chorus, looking vaguely... guilty.  
  
“Thought you said guilt was a human dilemma,” Axel says, awkwardly trying to adjust his half-hard cock without Roxas noticing.  
  
The look Roxas shoots him is scathing. “Yeah, well, your kind is catching.”  
  
.  
  
Roxas isn’t blind to the way the human looks at him sometimes, eyes soft when he smiles at Roxas. It doesn’t escape his notice that Axel shows up more often now—Roxas watching him as he makes his way down the hallway and through the library, something like a skip in his step. He reads to Roxas now rather than just reading with his back to the glass, his voice smooth and smokey.  
  
“You really do like me, don’t you?” Roxas asks one day, his fingers curled around the bars of his cage. Axel glances up from the book they’re reading this week—silly fairytales and dragons—and gives him an odd look.  
  
“Of course I do,” he says, and goes back to reading.  
  
Roxas’s heart thumps in his chest, ever so slightly faster.  
  
.  
  
The next time Axel sees Roxas, he kisses him, hands buried in Roxas’s hair to tug him as close to the bars as he can get. Roxas moans against his mouth, tail twisting in on itself below him. He’s trembling, the fins along his back quivering. Not for the first time, Axel wishes he could swim with him.  
  
When he pulls away, Roxas smiles at him—slow and sweet, quaking to life like the earth slotting together with the sea—push and pull.  
  
.  
  
“I noticed you’ve been spending more time with my creature,” Mr. Rose says idly over the sounds of screams, casually plucking a nail off of a man’s thumb.  
  
Axel has to wrestle down the urge to correct him, because his name is _Roxas,_ and he’s not his _boss’s_ creature.  
  
 _Names have power,_ Roxas’s voice whispers in the back of his head.  
  
Axel nods and pulls out a bone-saw. “I have been,” he says. “It’s interesting.”  
  
“See that you don’t get too attached,” Mr. Rose remarks coldly, in the same detached tone that he says ‘see that you don’t get any blood on this suit.’  
  
“I won’t,” Axel smiles.  
  
The lie tastes like bile in the back of his throat.  
  
.  
  
Axel’s starting to regret taking this job. He’d known from the start that it was messy and, if he was honest with himself, downright impossible. Two marks to take out and another to bring back for Roxas’s midday lunch and all while he’s halfway across the world.  
  
There’s somebody’s blood under his fingernails and tendrils of hair wrapped around his thumb, and everything is not okay at all.  
  
With the first mark dispatched, it should have been easy to finish up. He’s a good little assassin—knows how to use a bone-saw and everything—but in all his history, he’s never been _caught_ like this.  
  
The room is dim and smells like mildew, and the chair he’s strapped to isn’t going to be easy to break, even if he dislocates his wrist to do so. There’s a man in a suit smirking a few paces away, wreathed in cigar smoke, and already he’s broken at least three of Axel’s ribs.  
  
“So,” the man grins, blowing smoke into Axel’s face. “I hear your name is Axel?”  
  
He bites his lip, glaring.  
  
“See, we need to learn how to communicate, my dear.” He steps forward, the bare lightbulb near the door reflecting off of his bald head. With a quick flex of his wrist, there’s a knife embedded in Axel’s shoulder, and he gasps, hunching forward. The man presses closer, until Axel can feel his putrid breath against his mouth. “You answer me, y’hear?” The man growls, twisting the blade. The tip of it grates on bone—tearing through muscle and Axel breathes carefully through his mouth, trying unsuccessfully to dismiss the pain.  
  
When he meets the man’s gaze, his grin widens. “You killed my daughter, Axel. She was twenty-three years old and just got _engaged_.” He twists the blade a little bit more. “Do you really think that I’m going to let you live after that?”  
  
Axel grunts and the man moves away, back to the table that’s placed carefully between them and the door—the one with all the torture instruments strewn about its surface like a scene from a B-list horror move. He lifts something—oh, a branding iron. Wonderful.  
  
“I’m going to make you suffer, sweetheart. And every day you’re going to wish that pretty little siren is here with you, just to rip your throat out and save you from the agony.”  
  
At this, his head jerks up, eyes wide. The man chuckles, leaning back against the table and tapping the branding iron against its surface. “Oh yes, _darling boy_ , I know all about that. Did you think that Mr. Rose didn’t have friends in high places? I’m here to teach you a lesson. And maybe Mr. Rose will remember that he should have never sent you to _me_ before I rip out your spleen.”  
  
He pulls back, and clubs the iron across Axel’s face, laughing at the mixture of blood and broken teeth that Axel spits onto the floor.  
  
“All you can do now is hope to hell that he remembers my little girl, and that you’re a good enough pet to keep around.”  
  
.  
  
Three weeks later, he staggers free, the man’s blood on his hands and a cheap gun shoved down the back of his pants.  
  
He figures that laying low for a while is his best bet.  
  
.  
  
“I’m sorry,” Mr. Rose says, his hand on Axel’s knee. “But you needed to be taught a lesson.”  
  
Axel nods, his eyes blank. “I did.”  
  
Mr. Rose smiles. “And you won’t touch my siren again, will you?”  
  
Mutely, Axel shakes his head.  
  
.  
  
He sneaks in the very next day, tired and bedraggled, his eye swelling into a mess of black and green. There’s blood streaked all over his body and his head hurts.  
  
Roxas smiles at him.  
  
His head isn’t the only thing that hurts.  
  
.  
  
Axel doesn’t come back for awhile—months—and when he does, he’s coated in someone else’s blood, and his eye is swollen shut.  
  
“I want to get you out of here,” he says, simply, like it’s something that’s easily accomplished.  
  
Roxas’s heart flip-flops in his chest.  
  
He feels like singing.  
  
.  
  
Axel doesn’t know why he never noticed the camera in the corner, though in retrospect, he was probably too head over heels to do something as simple as _pay attention to his surroundings_ until it was too late. Now he’s regretting his actions, hanging by his ankles, suspended over Roxas’s tank as Mr. Rose glares at him, flanked by two bodyguards with beeswax stuffed into their ears.  
  
“I liked you, Axel,” he says mournfully, as if it’s Axel’s fault that he’s an asshole holding a sentient creature captive.  
  
“Yeah, well, I didn’t like you,” Axel remarks cheerfully. He’s studiously keeping his gaze away from the water, holding Mr. Rose’s gaze until the old man finally looks away.  
  
“It didn’t have to come to this,” Mr. Rose says, motioning to one of the bodyguards to cut the rope.  
  
“Yeah, I think it did.”  
  
It’s the last thing Axel says before he gets a mouthful of salt water, the liquid closing in over his head.  
  
.  
  
When Axel hits the water, Roxas freezes—kelp tickling his cheekbones as he peers upwards in horror. There’s a part of him screaming for him to help, because from the moment Axel hits the water Roxas can tell that he’s bloody, the scent cloying and too enticing, making his teeth itch with the urge to rend flesh and splinter bones. He’s hurt and he’s _human_ but he’s also Axel, who sat with Roxas day by day—who read him stories and brought him snacks. He’s the man who wished to set Roxas free, and it’s that thought that holds him back, his nails digging deep into the sand bed, clenching fistfuls of the stuff to ground him as his shoulders shake, teeth digging into his lower lip.  
  
He doesn’t want this, Roxas tells himself. He doesn’t need to rip Axel’s throat out, because this human isn’t like the others. This is his friend, even if the word tastes like ashes on his tongue.  
  
Roxas closes his eyes and carefully doesn’t look, even though he knows Axel is thrashing about in the water like an angelfish trapped in the tentacles of an anemone. He can feel the disturbance in the water, all the characteristic traits of prey, like Axel isn’t a monster in his own right.  
  
He’s shouting something, obscenities in various languages like his rage is too much to be restricted to just the one.  
  
After several more moments, silence falls. Axel isn’t thrashing anymore, awkwardly treading water and breathing in soft panicked gasps.  
  
When Roxas carefully slits his eyes open, Axel’s looking at him. He isn’t doing anything, just staring with something like fear etched across his face. It makes Roxas’s chest seize up, heartstrings tugging too tight, and he’s forced to close his eyes again, because fear—well, he can pretend that Axel isn’t like them—that the blood filtering through the water is no different than the times that Sora cut himself open on a particularly sharp rock—but fear is different. He can’t pretend that it’s anything other than what it is, hard as he tries to conjure up an image of Sora frightened by a passing shark when he was still a pup.  
  
So he stills himself, biting down hard enough that his lip tears—the smell of Axel’s blood drowned out by the taste of his own. It’s maddening in its own way, because the knowledge is still _there_ , that there’s a human floundering about in his tank not twenty feet above him—soft flesh and stringy sinew, gristle between his teeth. He shakes and curls in on himself and doesn’t listen to the soft, concerned noise that Axel makes somewhere above him.  
  
He closes his eyes, curls in on himself and thinks of chasing Sora around their home—playing tag with the whales and singing along with them until it was time to go home.  
  
It’s almost enough to drown out his instincts.  
  
.  
  
Axel doesn’t know what he was expecting from Roxas when he dropped into the water, but it wasn’t _this._ It wasn’t the tiny little thing curled up at the bottom of the tank, chewing on his lip so fiercely that there’s a very thin cloud of red hanging over his shoulder like some kind of demented halo. That’s when the fear starts wrapping its way around his throat, choking him.  
  
He goes as still as possible, treading water with slow, easy movements even though his left leg hurts like a _bitch_ from where one of Mr. Rose’s lackeys nearly crushed his knee. To be honest, he hurts _everywhere_ —the pain kicking in now that Mr. Rose isn’t in the immediate vicinity. The adrenaline is still there, but it’s fading fast, surrendering to the utter terror at the idea of being trapped in a tank with a siren who isn’t completely in control of himself.  
  
Axel wasn’t worried originally. Hanging over this tank, he’d thought _joke’s on you_ and _Roxas would never hurt me_ , but now he isn’t so sure. He’s never considered what it would mean before, because Roxas is his friend, not just some bloodthirsty monster of the deep. But this is clearly Roxas trying to hold himself back, fighting with that instinct that all humans in the water are prey.  
  
So Axel stay quiet and tries his damnedest to slow his racing heart.  
  
With a sinking feeling in his gut and the memory of Roxas reducing a full grown man into something less than fish food, he waits.  
  
.  
  
An hour later, his arms start to go numb.  
  
Two hours after that it starts to become more and more difficult to keep his head above the water—his muscles spasming so violently that the water closes over his head for a few panicked seconds before he manages to coerce his sore body to claw itself back to the surface.  
  
Half an hour later, he can’t manage to claw his way back up.  
  
.  
  
The tank is quiet. There’s kelp tickling his brow and his nails have sand embedded beneath them—it hurts vaguely, and he thinks he might have torn one of them. He’s not thinking about Sora anymore, because the relief of the distraction has faded to a distant kind of ache for home. He wants his brother’s hand to brush against his shoulder and tell him it will be all right—wants to curl up with him the way they did when they were small—back when they wrapped themselves around each other so tightly that you didn’t know where one ended and the other began. So instead of Sora, he thinks of home—whale song and shellfish and his mother’s hands in his hair. He thinks of the tiger sharks that he used to play with—the pups that were small enough that they thought he was like them—the reflection of the sun flickering through the water.  
  
There’s a legend out there that one of his ancestors used a kiss to give a human air. The legend is mocked far and wide, because what mer would want a human to _live?_  
  
But now, when Roxas uncurls himself to see Axel sinking, he wonders if there’s any truth to the tale. Kisses only have so much power in reality—life is not a fairytale where the power of true love will get you through all things. He wonders how humans ever told such stories as the ones that Axel has shown him. The little mermaid and her prince, while not a happy tale to begin with, was nothing like the stories the true sirens of the deep sang.  
  
Possibly, belief is the key to all this.  
  
So Roxas ignores the smell of blood and lets the pull of panic drive him, because, affection or not, Axel is the closest thing that he has to an escape route from this place. It doesn’t matter that something in Roxas’s heart trembles at the idea of him drowning, because that’s not what really matters here. Freedom matters. Roxas can’t entrust this matter to his heart, but he can trust his instincts.  
  
Pressing his lips to Axel’s is nothing like that first time, when Axel’s hands had twisted in his hair—tugging him in and kissing him so deeply that Roxas didn’t stop shaking until long after he’d left. This time, Axel’s lips are slack under his—unresponsive—and for a moment, Roxas thinks he’s too late. So he kisses Axel harder, anger bleeding through him, nipping at Axel’s lips until he tastes blood.  
  
After a moment, Axel shudders and his hands come up—nails scratching at the base of Roxas’ skull as he takes the kiss deeper, breathing Roxas in. When he pulls back, his eyes are wide as he takes a deep breath, and, gills or no gills, it goes down clean.  
  
All the same, Roxas doesn’t want to risk it, so he takes hold of Axel’s hips and boosts him to the surface.  
  
Axel gasps when he surfaces, drawing deep breaths as Roxas holds him, their bodies pressed flush together—Roxas’ cheek against the soft flesh of Axel’s neck. For a moment, just one, he thinks it might be too much—that the temptation of flesh might be too much for him to resist—and he grazes his teeth against the gentle pulse of blood beneath Axel’s skin. The moment passes when Axel lets out a choked noise that’s half laugh, half moan, pushing his body against Roxas’s as if he can’t quite help himself.  
  
“This is ridiculous,” Axel says into his hair a moment later, his body still twitching in little stuttery movements. “I nearly die and here I’ve got a hard-on for a _fish._ ”  
  
At this, Roxas flushes, pulling his teeth away from Axel’s throat and no longer wondering what the twitchy little movements signify. Axel laughs again and the sound is enough that Roxas has to roll his eyes, butting his head into Axel’s shoulder.  
  
“Calling us fish is impolite in most tribes,” he says calmly, never mind the fact that _humans_ themselves were an impolite topic beneath the ocean. Axel just presses his face further into Roxas’ hair and laughs even harder, as if they aren’t stuck in a tank together just waiting for the human to come back and see why Axel isn’t dead yet.  
  
And when he does, Roxas will be waiting.  
  
.  
  
When the man returns to the room, he’s alone. There’s beeswax stuffed into his ears, so Roxas takes Axel and hides in a little nook of coral that’s been his spot for years. He presses little kisses to Axel’s lips, dotting them up his shoulder and along his neck not because he needs to, but because of the way it makes Axel shudder against him as they watch the man pace the floor above them—confused by the lack of blood.  
  
Roxas presses another kiss to Axel’s lips, a quick one for the road, and then presses a finger where his lips just were. He doesn’t think that he really needs to tell Axel to be quiet, but then again, you never know.  
  
He strikes when the man stoops to pull up the door—just one mistake. That’s all it takes.  
  
Roxas takes a moment to savor the look of horror on the human’s face before he rakes jagged blades across the man’s belly—tearing through expensive material and flesh alike. He bares his teeth in a triumphant grin when pain flashes across the man’s face.  
  
He wants to make him suffer—make him bleed and hurt and drown, but there’s Axel to consider, and that there might be men storming up the stairs right now. So he takes a deep breath and leaves him there, beckoning Axel up and away from the human’s sick-smelling blood—wrapping his arms around Axel’s waist and boosting him into the room beyond.  
  
For a moment, Axel looks lost—dripping wet and hovering over the water, his arms reaching and then flinching back as if he’s not sure what to do. Roxas spares one last look at the human bleeding out into the water and thinks about wrenching his chest cavity open and eating his heart.  
  
And then he looks back at Axel, who still looks puzzled over how he’s going to carry a siren out of this house and back to the ocean.  
  
He hasn’t done it in years, but the memory is still there, clinging to the backs of his eyelids—the one time that he’d ever walked on the beach with Sora, sand clinging to his very human toes.  
  
Roxas smirks and—ignoring Axel’s outstretched arms—climbs out of the tank himself.  
  
.  
  
There are more people in the house.  
  
But as it turns out, Axel’s actually really good with weapons, and he’s even better when it comes to fire. They tear through the house, blood and guts and the smell of smoke in their nostrils, and Roxas can’t seem to stop smiling. There’s blood covering every inch of him and gristle stuck between his teeth, but he’s too fucking happy to care. They’re both in their element like this—the screams of the dying a symphony to their dance, so Roxas stuffs some beeswax into Axel’s ears and _sings._  
  
.  
  
It’s hard to get a hotel room covered in blood, especially when you’re toting a naked kid who’s still grinning that predator’s grin—all sharp serrated teeth that he can’t seem to tuck away—so Axel takes Roxas back to one of the apartments that even Mr. Rose doesn’t know about. The sketchy one on the far west side of the city where the towering skyscrapers give way to old brick houses with windows mostly boarded up—graffiti crawling up the sides of the buildings like ivy.  
  
He shoves Roxas inside, because even though he’d pushed his leather jacket onto Roxas’s shoulders, there’s no mistaking the long, milky pale stretch of his legs.  
  
Which—legs. New development. And ears that are rounded and human and not blue streaked with gold.  
  
He doesn’t let himself think of the legs though, because if he thought about legs he would think about what’s between them, and there’s a time and a place to admire someone’s package, and now is not it. Now he is focusing on getting them both a quick shower, packing a quick bag, and getting out of here as fast as possible, because while Mr. Rose didn’t necessarily know where this apartment was, it didn’t mean that someone out there wasn’t aware of it.  
  
Once they’re safely inside, he stops and just breathes for a moment—then immediately crinkles his nose, because apparently the last time he was here he didn’t toss out the takeout Chinese in the kitchen. Roxas seems equally disgusted, though his fascination with the couch and the books along his wall seems to have overwhelmed his sense of smell.  
  
Axel goes to toss the Chinese out the back door and finds a canister of Febreeze under the sink, dousing the entire kitchen with it before he’s satisfied. When he comes back, Roxas is curled up on the couch—legs tucked up underneath him with Zack’s copy of ‘The Little Prince’ in his lap.  
  
“You can read French?” he asks, stopping to lean against the doorway. Roxas glances up at him and shoots him an unimpressed look.  
  
“I speak several languages,” he says—and then, in German—“You didn’t really think that my native tongue was English, did you?”  
  
Axel shakes his head. “Well, try to limit yourself to English, German, and French for my sake.”  
  
Roxas just grins at him, replying in something that sounds like Portuguese before hiding his face behind the book again. Axel rolls his eyes and crosses the room, tucking his hands beneath Roxas’s armpits and hauling him upright. “‘C’mon, shower. We need to get out of here in case anyone on Mr. Rose’s payroll knows the address.”  
  
Roxas scoffs. “What good is a payroll if the guy’s dead?”  
  
Axel leads the way across the carpet, Roxas following reluctantly at his side. “It really depends,” he finally says when they reach the bathroom. “Some of us were actually loyal to him; others just wanted the money.”  
  
He turns the knob on and lets icy water prickle at his feet. “Either way, how many people do you think knew about you? Three? Four? Twenty? More?” He carefully doesn’t look at Roxas, shedding his clothes quickly and efficiently before jerking the jacket off Roxas’s shoulders.  
  
When he does finally look at him, Roxas’s eyes are narrowed, as if he knows what Axel has to say next.  
  
“It doesn’t matter that they aren’t on his payroll anymore. A siren’s worth _a lot_ of money and anyone who knew about you is gunning after us. I guarantee it.”  
  
Roxas grimaces at him, so Axel pushes him under the spray and climbs in after him.  
  
.  
  
“You’re lucky that I don’t turn back in the water,” Roxas says idly a few moments later, when Axel is massaging cheap drug-store shampoo into his scalp. Roxas’s hair is softer than he thought it would be, for all that it had dried into a spiky mess on the way over.  
  
Axel snickers into his shoulder. “Who showed you _Splash_?”  
  
Roxas sighs. “That _human_ ,” he says, making the word sound like a curse. “He left it on in the library one day. Thought he was being clever, the stupid fucker.”  
  
Axel laughs and dunks Roxas’s head under the water, grinning when he comes back out sputtering. There’s a bar of soap on the side of the tub, and he grabs it, rubbing at the dried blood that hasn’t quite washed off of Roxas’s neck. It’s quiet for a moment as he ghosts the soap along Roxas’s shoulders, scrubbing vigorously when he comes across a particularly stubborn patch of blood. He turns Roxas around to wash his chest, and startles when he finds Roxas looking at him thoughtfully.  
  
“Please tell me you aren’t wondering how I taste right now?” he mutters, carefully soaping Roxas’s collarbone.  
  
Roxas grins at him, shark’s teeth bared in a way that kick-starts Axel’s heart into overdrive. “Oh, don’t worry. I already know that you’d taste absolutely delicious.”  
  
Axel stops and stares at him, hair dripping into his eyes. For a brief second, he wonders who would win that fight—here on land where he has the advantage. He quickly dismisses the thought.  
  
To his embarrassment, his cock is hardening against Roxas’s thigh, as if his brain has suddenly gone on holiday and clearly can’t recognize a threat when it hears one. Roxas just bites his lip, eyes half-lidded as he slides closer, pressing warm, slick skin down Axel’s front.  
  
His arms loop around Axel’s shoulders and it’s funny, because as a human, he’s shorter than Axel—going up on tiptoe to press a kiss to the side of Axel’s neck. It should be nerve-wracking, having teeth that sharp so close to a major artery, but somehow, it isn’t—even when Roxas bites down gently, drawing tiny pinpricks of blood that wash away when the water hits. He shivers and presses closer, slotting their legs together so he can feel Roxas against him—all those fascinating new bits that he hadn’t been able to appreciate before.  
  
Roxas gasps, wet and open-mouthed against his collarbone when Axel bucks against him. In retaliation, Roxas bites down a little bit harder on his shoulder, away from the veins, and this bite actually hurts—a pain that Axel can barely differentiate from the pleasure even though he knows the bite is going to bruise and bleed. He hisses when Roxas presses a halting kiss to the wound, lapping up the blood before he pulls back and looks at Axel, his pupils dilated so wide that Axel can barely make out the thin band of blue.  
  
“See?” Roxas purrs, pressing a bloody kiss to Axel’s mouth. When he pulls back, he’s grinning. “Delicious.”  
  
Axel groans and presses even closer, wondering if there’s enough leverage in this shower to just lift Roxas up and fuck him against the wall—or hell, have Roxas fuck him. He’s not that picky, and right now, he’s hard enough that he’d take Roxas dry if he had to.  
  
“Fuck, we probably don’t have time for this,” he growls, raking his nails down Roxas’ back.  
  
Roxas just kisses him again.  
  
“Fine, fine. Bed—now.”  
  
Roxas rolls his eyes at him. “So picky,” he grumbles, but stumbles out of the shower behind Axel anyways.  
  
.  
  
Axel was never very fond of this bed. There’s a loose spring somewhere that always jabs into his back when he has to sleep in it, and no matter how many times he launders them, the sheets always smell faintly of dust.  
  
When he and Roxas tumble back onto it, there’s the faintest bit of sunlight filtering in through the blinds, slanting across the sheets.  
  
Axel lands on his back, still soaking wet, and he’s cold for a minute before he has a lap full of a squirming siren. “Have you done this before?” he asks, because he’s curious. It’s not everyday that you learn the sexual exploits of a siren.  
  
“Nope,” Roxas answers, enthusiastically grinding down against Axel’s dick.  
  
“Never? Not even with one of your fishy friends?”  
  
Roxas glowers at him. “I was just a pup when they took me. Did you see anybody else in that tank with me?” he growls. “No? Then stop talking and _fuck me._ ”  
  
There’s lube in the dresser beside his bed, but the condoms expired about two years. When Roxas realizes what he’s staring at, he grunts and curses in a language that Axel doesn’t recognize—something with flowing syllables that’s distinctly musical, prettier than any of the romance languages.  
  
“I don’t care, I don’t care,” he pants. “Take me like this; I already told you that you won’t get anything, and mating doesn’t work like that with males.”  
  
Axel bites his lip, shuddering when Roxas leans down to nip at his chest—sucking on the skin there until it bruises. Condoms are important in his line of business. He may not be a rapist, but to have your DNA out there for someone to turn against you at a moment’s notice... Not to mention that having a _baby_ with the life he lives—well, he’s used to using protection.  
  
Roxas growls again at his hesitation, and this time when he bites down, it cuts through the pleasure, sharp as a knife. “If you don’t fuck me,” he hisses, “I’ll do it myself.”  
  
And really, that’s all Axel needs to know. Roxas isn’t human anyway, so it’s not as if he has anything to worry about. With that in mind, he slicks his fingers up, sliding two into Roxas with one smooth motion that has Roxas squirming in his lap, whimpering as he rocks down to meet them. He stretches Roxas carefully, because he doesn’t care how desperate the kid is, if it’s really his first time, he’s bound to be tight.  
  
He’s so meticulous preparing him—pulling out several time to squeeze more lube onto his fingers—that Roxas finally gets sick of it and jerks Axel’s fingers out of him so he can pin his wrists to the bed, near snarling in Axel’s face, flushed all the way down his chest. It’s awkward when he grabs Axel’s cock with one hand, because the other is still trying to pin Axel’s wrists, but eventually he manages to guide Axel’s cock to the right place and sinks down—  
  
It’s not quite the smoothest movement. He barely takes Axel’s head in before he has to let go of his wrists to brace himself, slamming the rest of the way down so quickly that Axel sees stars.  
  
Roxas is trembling when Axel opens his eyes, just sitting on his cock and panting quietly, his own eyes closed. He’s still enough that Axel traces a hand down his spine. “Okay?” he asks, because suddenly the rushing in his ears is gone, replaced with a silence so absolute that he can hear the birds chirping outside. Roxas nods jerkily, and when his eyes slide open, it’s not pain there—his eyes are glazed with pleasure, as if the feel of Axel’s cock inside him is too much too soon.  
  
“We don’t have to—” he starts, and doesn’t get any further than that because Roxas is glaring at him again and sliding up his cock only to slam himself back down again.  
  
“Okay, or we could do that,” Axel says breathlessly when Roxas repeats the movement.  
  
He doesn’t make much noise as Roxas rides him, some breathy little sighs when Roxas cants his hips a certain way or when Roxas slides down to press their chests together, rocking back idly. The angle starts to hurt a bit, so Axel takes a deep breath and rolls them over, unsurprised when Roxas glares at him.  
  
He fucks Roxas slowly, teasing him until he howls and tells him, “Faster, you fucker or I swear I will rip your fucking throat out.” Roxas bares his teeth to prove it, so Axel fucks him harder—hard enough that Roxas has to grip the headboard, nearly crushing it in beneath his hands.  
  
He allows himself three more thrusts before he lets himself come, buried deep, Roxas clawing at the bedsheets beneath him. When he pulls out, Roxas makes a mewling disgruntled sound, so Axel crawls back—leaning down to take Roxas into his mouth in one smooth motion.  
  
Roxas lets out a surprised noise and Axel _sucks_ —and, well, that’s it, Roxas is coming down his throat, his hips lifted up and clear off the bed, fucking Axel’s mouth.  
  
He’s beautiful like this—the arch of his body one smooth golden line that Axel can’t help but touch—drawing his fingers through the sweat at the small of Roxas’s back even as he makes a face and swallows the heavy liquid sitting on his tongue. He’s never been all _that_ fond of giving head. But if the result is this—Roxas’s head resting on Axel’s pillow as he catches his breath—well, in that case Axel is more than willing to try it again and again until he gets good enough that he can suck Roxas’s brain out through his cock.  
  
“That was nice,” Roxas purrs quietly, stretching.  
  
Axel rolls his eyes. “Nice is an understatement,” he replies, scratching at the nape of his neck.  
  
There’s silence for a moment, and Axel flops over onto his back and listens to the soft sounds of Roxas’s breathing mixing with the quiet sounds of the afternoon. The birds are ever present, stubborn, and not frightened away by the presence of steamrollers and men in hardhats just waiting for an excuse to tear this place down. Someone is drilling down the street, the vibrations making Axel feel as if his brain is rattling around in his skull. You never hear the laughter of children this far out—just the sound of gunshots late in the night and, if one listens very carefully, the distant sounds of screaming.  
  
“We have to leave soon, you know,” he remarks, rolling over so that he’s facing Roxas.  
  
“I know,” Roxas mutters, slanting a sideways glance at him through his lashes. He breathes for a moment longer before he slides off the bed with a grunt, making a face as come trickles down his thigh. “Ugh, that’s a new feeling.”  
  
Axel grins at him. “Are you opposed to a repeat performance?”  
  
Roxas shoots him a disappointed look. “Please,” he scoffs. “Maybe next time I’ll just have you on your back.”  
  
“Now that, I would encourage,” Axel purrs, climbing from the bed and taking a page out of Roxas’s book—stretching until his joints pop. He surveys the room around him briefly—the dirty clothes on the floor and the generic paintings on the wall. He never liked this place, but there’s no getting back to one of his more frequented apartments—not this time. He’ll have to make do with the things that are here and leave the rest of it behind. It’s probably a good thing that the things that are important to him he can take with him—the old bracelet on his wrist, its threads starting to come unravelled; and Zack’s jacket that he never leaves behind.  
  
In a small town just outside of the city limits, there’s a safety deposit box with a single toy sword inside—old enough that it’s slightly rotted, but the inscription on its side is still untouched.  
  
“Want to order a pizza while I gather my things?” Axel asks, leaning down to grab a pair of clean underwear.  
  
Roxas frowns at him. “What’s a pizza?”  
  
.  
  
As it turns out, pizza is little more than greasy toxic waste masquerading as real food, which Roxas points out to Axel every chance he gets. The box sits on Axel’s coffee table, leaking grease onto the papers beneath it. Roxas hopes they weren’t important, but from the look of this place, nothing here is too important to Axel.  
  
As Axel bustles around the apartment, Roxas watches him from his position on the couch, another book in his lap and a lamp on just over his shoulder. It’s warm on his shoulders, this artificial light, as if it’s the sun itself. He basks in it, even as he tries to push away the phantom sensation of his scales drying out.  
  
He watches Axel spin in a circle—a pair of boxers in one hand and a stale shirt in the other—before the human heads back into the bedroom, apparently having forgotten something for the fifth or six time. “I thought you said you’d done this before?” he calls over his shoulder.  
  
The response comes back garbled, as if Axel is digging under the cabinets again. “I have! I just haven’t had to in a while.”  
  
“So this is a skill that fades with time,” he remarks dryly, turning the page.  
  
Axel pokes his head out of the bedroom, scowling at him. “Not necessarily.”  
  
“Then hurry up. This one’s boring,” he says, tapping his fingers on the book’s cover. When Axel notices what he’s reading, his lip curls in disgust.  
  
“What the hell are you reading _Twilight_ for? It’s awful.”  
  
“You had it in your bookcase,” Roxas points out.  
  
“It wasn’t _mine._ Someone left it here.”  
  
Roxas raises a brow. “Someone?”  
  
“Yes, some _one._ ”  
  
He puts the book down on top of the pizza box, hoping that through osmosis, it’ll get destroyed like the table that the box is resting on. “Should I be jealous of this someone?”  
  
Axel laughs at him. “You? Jealous? Please.”  
  
Roxas scowls, rolling to his feet and crossing the living room to where Axel’s standing. “I don’t like it,” he growls, backing Axel into the door.  
  
Axel laughs again, his eyes softening when he gets a good look at Roxas. He leans forward, a handful of socks still pressed between them, and kisses Roxas lightly on the temple. “I wouldn’t do this for just anyone, Roxas,” he says, lips moving against the skin there. “I’m throwing everything away, and I’m doing it for you. Believe me when I tell you that you should be jealous of no one.”  
  
Roxas sighs. “Just... get moving, will you?”  
  
Axel grins and lifts a single duffel-bag from the floor. “Done!”  
  
“Well, what are we waiting for?”  
  
.  
  
As it turns out, road trips are especially boring. Roxas’s new legs start cramping up after the first hour, so he squirms a lot, setting his feet on the dashboard and reclining the seat back, then kicking his legs up beneath him, then setting them back on the floor. The fifth time that he moves in just under half an hour, Axel glares at him.  
  
“Stop fidgeting.”  
  
“How? How do humans coop themselves up like this? Your bodies are supposed to _move,_ not stay in the same position for hours.”  
  
“We cover large distances this way,” Axel says, slamming on the brakes when someone cuts him off. He lays on the horn, thrusting his hand out the window, middle finger raised.  
  
“I think you’re just lazy.”  
  
“It’s a big world!” Axel exclaims, turning an incredulous look on him.  
  
“It’s a big ocean, too.” He shrugs. “We deal.”  
  
.  
  
They stop in at a gas station just outside of a place called Traverse Town. After filling up the vehicle, Axel leans in through the window, head cocked. “Anything I can get you while I’m inside?” he asks, pointing at the store with his thumb. “Soda? Snack? Anchovies?”  
  
Roxas shudders, thinking of the pizza and the terrible little fish on top of it. “No, thank you. Some water, perhaps?”  
  
Axel nods and sets out across the parking lot. Roxas watches him go—the sway of his hips and the way the breeze tousles the ends of his braid. He holds the door for a little old lady when he gets to the entrance, and Roxas stifles a laugh with the sleeve of the shirt Axel lent him. Funny little place this is, where murderers hold doors open for the weak.  
  
Roxas fiddles with the button for the window, making it go up and down for a few seconds before something just beyond it catches his eye. Squinting, he can just make out the man in the driver’s seat of the car that’s been following them for close to an hour now. The man is slim, with close-cropped dark hair and a pair of sunglasses that obscure his eyes. Roxas wonders where he’s hiding his gun.  
  
Slowly, he nudges the car door open. The asphalt is scorching to his bare feet as he creeps across it, but he’s had far worse. When Roxas slides into the passenger seat of the man’s car, he barely seems surprised.  
  
“Can I do something for you?” he asks, hand twitching minutely to his waist.  
  
Roxas grins brightly at him. “I thought that I could do something for you,” he purrs, batting his lashes. The man laughs, his hand relaxing against the steering wheel.  
  
“Did you now?” he says, removing the dark sunglasses to reveal clear blue eyes. He shifts so that he’s fully facing Roxas and after giving him a once-over, he grins. “Well, what are you waiting for?” he asks, gesturing towards his lap.  
  
Roxas smiles, because there’s no possible way that this man knows what he is. Perhaps he thinks that he’ll get something for taking out the man who killed his boss and that Roxas is just a piece of ass Axel picked up along the way. Hell, maybe he’s been sent by someone who _is_ in the know but was reluctant to relinquish the information that he’s after a siren. Either way, if this man is stupid enough to let his dick anywhere near someone who just climbed out of Axel’s car, he’s hardly a threat.  
  
Roxas slides closer, reaching over the middle console to unzip the man’s jeans. Already there’s hardness pressing against his fingers through the fabric, and Roxas bites back the urge to laugh when the man cants his hips up, rubbing against Roxas’s hand. With the zipper halfway down, he stops and meets the man’s eyes. “You’ll have to roll your window up,” he whispers, biting down on his lower lip.  
  
The man laughs breathlessly, still pushing up into Roxas’s hand. “C’mon, baby, where’s your sense of adventure?”  
  
Roxas leans down, pressing a kiss to the tip of the man’s erection through the fabric. He looks back up through heavily lidded eyes. “Maybe I just don’t want anyone else to catch the show.”  
  
The man rolls up the window with a heavy sigh, muttering to himself. Apparently sick of waiting, he bats Roxas’s hand aside, unzipping his pants the rest of the way himself and pulling his cock out—grinning as he rubs it against Roxas’s cheek, then down, to the corner of his mouth. “Okay, window’s all closed, sweetheart. You got me all to yourself. Now wrap those pretty lips of yours around my dick, yeah?”  
  
Roxas grins, all teeth, and leans down.  
  
The poor fucker never said anything about watching his teeth.  
  
.  
  
When Axel emerges from the store ten minutes later, bitching about long lines, Roxas is safely back in their car, rooting around in the glove box. The only thing he’s found is insurance information that certainly doesn’t have Axel’s name on it and a handful of napkins.  
  
Axel passes him a bottle of water, a bag of chips clenched between his teeth. After tearing it open and stuffing a handful of them into his mouth, he offers some to Roxas.  
  
“Not hungry,” he grins, patting his stomach.  
  
Axel rolls his eyes. “You’ve still got some blood on your chin,” he remarks, reaching over to wipe it off. Roxas smiles at him and nips at the tips of his fingers as they’re retreating.  
  
“Do I even want to know?” Axel asks.  
  
Roxas nods to the car that’s still sitting in the corner of the parking lot, tinted windows obscuring the carnage inside. “He’s been following us for a while now. No worries; it’s been taken care of.”  
  
Axel sighs and starts the car. “Let me know next time, okay?”  
  
Roxas offers him his pinky, and Axel laughs.  
  
.  
  
That night, when Axel’s sleeping in their hotel room, he visits a bar down the road and brings back a heart.  
  
He drops it on Axel’s pillow, and, with a snort, Axel startles awake, staring blearily at Roxas for a moment. When he notices the heart, he crinkles up his nose and tosses the heart and the pillow clear off the bed, stealing Roxas’s instead. Once he’s successfully buried his face in the cotton, he mutters, “You’re like that cat I never had, Jesus Christ. What’s next? Mice?”  
  
Roxas slides beneath the sheets next to him and wraps his arms around Axel’s waist. He grins and props his chin up against Axel’s shoulder, nuzzling at his neck. “Do you want me to bring you mice?” he purrs, scratching his nails through the coarse hair leading beneath the band of Axel’s boxers. When Axel’s breath hitches, he slips a hand under it and wraps a fist around Axel’s cock.  
  
Axel groans. “Just stop bringing me dead things, okay? There is something called subtlety, and you and it need to get acquainted.”  
  
“But where’s the fun in that?”  
  
.

  
They spend their second day in Traverse Town, because there’s a festival going on in the Third District that Axel seems mildly interested in. As far as Roxas is concerned, it’s a bit silly—food and dancing and merriment, little children scattered here and there.  
  
They dress up in fancy clothes for a picture booth—Axel squeezing into a pair of breeches and shrugging on a gorgeous overcoat. He even lets the girl at the booth pull some of his hair back into a ponytail, spritzing some hairspray over it. He grins at Roxas and leans over to whisper into his ear.  
  
"Y'know, this would be perfect if you could whip out those teeth of yours. The pirate and the mermaid," he grins, playfully tousling Roxas' hair as he sulkily lets himself be dressed as a bar wench.  
  
"We aren't _mermaids._ Mermaids are for kids books," he growls.  
  
He lets some of his teeth show when the camera flashes anyway.

 

  
  
When they're back in normal clothes they ride something called a ferris wheel and Axel buys Roxas a stuffed whale because he thinks he’s the height of hilarity. The day isn’t completely wasted, though, because that's the day that Axel introduces him to candy apples—the one human food that Roxas hasn’t been completely disgusted by.  
  
That night, they both visit the bar down the street and entice a young woman back to their hotel room with them. She’s pretty—inky dark hair spilling down her back and mischievous eyes so dark that they’re nearly black.  
  
Her laughter reminds him of whale song, and her kisses taste like the sea. She reminds him of home, mixed blood in her veins and fire in her eyes. He wonders if she can hear the sea calling her, or if she’s oblivious to her heritage. He supposes it doesn’t matter.  
  
As it happens, mixed blood isn’t all that different from human.  
  
.  
  
“Look, I appreciate that you’re enthusiastic, bu—”  
  
Roxas glares at Axel’s flaccid cock and tries mouthing the head. It gives a halfhearted twitch but ultimately droops back down onto his thigh. Roxas glares some more.  
  
It had been a great idea in theory when Roxas was pressing kisses down his chest, licking and sucking bruises into the pale skin there—peeling his pants down his hips and mouthing at his hipbones. But seeing Roxas down there, his lips wrapped around Axel’s cock...  
  
Apparently while Axel didn’t give a shit about Roxas sucking on his jugular, he wasn’t all that okay with the idea of those teeth being so close to his junk.  
  
“I’m sorry?” he whimpers when Roxas levels the glare at him rather than his cock.  
  
Roxas sighs and crawls up Axel’s body until he’s sitting on his stomach, the briefs that Axel let him borrow pushed down past his balls. “Your loss,” he says simply and wraps a hand around his own dick.  
  
When he comes, he does so all over Axel’s face and kisses him on the forehead.  
  
Well, Axel’s finally hard.  
  
.  
  
“No—it isn’t—like this, see?” Axel places a hand atop his, guiding it gently. Roxas snorts.  
  
“I don’t understand why you’re making me do this.”  
  
Axel doesn’t take his eyes away from the road but tightens his grip on Roxas’s hand. He flinches when a bird swoops in low. “Because you need to learn.”  
  
Roxas rolls his eyes. “Do not.”  
  
“Yes, you do,” Axel growls through gritted teeth, knuckles white from where he’s gripping his thigh.  
  
“Nope.”  
  
Axel flinches again when they pass too closely to a pedestrian, the woman shouting after them angrily. He lets a few seconds pass before he speaks. “What if I’m hurt? Or need some emergency bedrest?”  
  
“Then we stop at a hotel.”  
  
“And how do we get to the hotel?” he asks incredulously.  
  
Roxas grins at him. “You drive yourself, moron.”  
  
Axel shrieks when the car jolts forward, nearly rear-ending the car in front of them. “No—no—gently on the gas—” A semi-truck lays on its horn as they speed around it. “Fuck, we’re going to die.”  
  
Roxas smirks at him. “You’re the one who insisted on this.”  
  
“Other lane! Other lane!” he yells, grabbing the wheel to swerve them out of the way of incoming traffic. Roxas laughs.  
  
“Hey, this is kind of fun.”  
  
.  
  
The drives are actually pretty nice. Every day Roxas pulls a new book out of the back of the car and reads with the sun in his face and the breeze in his hair—Axel smoking cigarettes idly next to him.  
  
“I still don’t know how you smoke those things,” Roxas says, even as he’s holding out a hand for a hit. Axel rolls his eyes and flicks his ear, handing the cigarette over. There’s 90s rock playing on the radio, and every so often, Axel will start singing along with it while Roxas sighs next to him, as if it physically pains him to listen. So Axel sings even louder, cooing love songs in Roxas’s ear and pretending that he can’t see him smiling.  
  
When they get too bored with the driving, they’ll pull over and pretend to hitchhike until some idiot stops to pick them up. The unsuspecting drivers always seem surprised when they wind up with a blade to the throat and a hungry siren grinning down at them.  
  
During the walk back to their car, Axel will bump Roxas’s shoulder and tease him about his sloppy eating. Sometimes—depending on how busy the road is, Roxas will push Axel back against a tree, or even down into the grass, and fuck him until he whimpers. On one memorable occasion, Roxas bends him over a guardrail and fucks him hard enough that there are bruises on Axel’s hips for a week from where the hot metal was pressing into him.  
  
It’s the happiest Axel’s ever been in his life.  
  
.  
  
They stop in a place called Radiant Garden, a few hundred miles outside of Twilight Town. It’s a gorgeous city, so once they check into their hotel, they spend the rest of the day wandering around, checking out the sights and keeping an eye out for anyone suspicious. Thus far, they’ve been lucky. Not counting the first, there have been three tails that they’ve had to dispatch. The first two were about as easy to take out as the guy at the gas station, but they run into some complications with the last one. Axel had ended up on his back in the hotel room as Roxas stitched up a knife wound in his side, the boy talking to him gently the whole time.  
  
The look on Roxas’s face the moment the knife had slid home—horrified, then utterly feral—it scared Axel. He’d torn the man’s throat out before Axel had hit the ground, scales creeping up the side of his neck—eyes going a deep, eerie blue.  
  
After that, they’d been more careful. It wasn’t a game anymore.  
  
The fact that Roxas had been scared— _terrified_ —in the aftermath, petting Axel’s face even as his teeth fluctuated between deadly and human every few seconds, like there was something in Roxas that couldn’t tell whether Axel was friend or _food_... They don’t talk about it, or about the way that Roxas had rushed Axel back to the car, driving like a bat out of hell even though Axel repeatedly told him he was okay. When they reached the hotel, Roxas had grabbed Axel’s credit card and booked them a room himself before going back to haul Axel out of the car and up the elevator.  
  
They didn’t talk about it.  
  
.  
  
Their first night in town, they run into a woman pushing a flower cart near the Bailey that has Roxas stopping in his tracks, growling low in his throat. When she turns, Axel can see why. There’s a pink flower tucked behind her left ear, and she’s wearing a long pink dress, but Axel knows her on sight, even if he was three the last time he saw her.  
  
Back then, she was like a dream that he hardly remembered. Just laughter and the smell of the sea, but now—now she’s real.  
  
“Aerith,” he breathes, his hand dropping Roxas’s so he can take a half a step forward.  
  
Roxas hisses at her when she turns to face them and steps between them. “You know her?” he growls, teeth dangerously sharp. Before he has a chance to respond, Aerith gasps.  
  
“Axel?” she whispers, hand going to her mouth. A moment later, she’s flung herself around Roxas and into his arms, clutching desperately at the small of his back. She’s babbling, he realizes, looking down at her in confusion, and when she pulls back, there are tears in her eyes. “I didn’t know—I thought—Axel, they told me that no one survived.”  
  
He goes tense, stuck staring at the pink of the flower and the thin tendrils of dark hair curling around it. There’s blood roaring in his ears, and he’s back to that night—gunshots and the sound of his mother drowning in her own blood. He can smell their corpses—Reno staring up at him with those milky dead eyes, the policemen shouting—he didn’t—he _can’t_ —  
  
“You knew about that?” he whispers into her hair, his eyes drifting from the flower to Roxas, just a few feet away and spitting mad. There’s confusion in his eyes, but mostly there’s anger, some jealousy—his teeth bared at Aerith, white-knuckled from suppressing the urge to tear her away.  
  
She pulls back, confused. “Of course I did. I told Zack that they were coming that night. I wished for years that I hadn’t—if he’d stayed with me, he would have been alive.”  
  
He takes deep breaths, willing himself to calm down—to claw his way free of the panic that’s wrapping its way around his throat. “You called the cops,” he whispers.  
  
She nods. “I didn’t know what to do. Once I made it to the cove...”  
  
“They were already dead,” he says, voice hollow.  
  
She nods again, swallowing. “I didn’t know that you were alive, I swear. I would have taken you with me if I’d known.”  
  
He closes his eyes, because if she’d taken him with her, who knows where he would be right now. He wouldn’t be killing people for the fun of it, he thinks. Maybe selling flowers with her—going to school at the university here in Radiant Garden. He could have grown up here, playing with other kids rather than putting bullets in people’s heads. He could have been here. But then, maybe Roxas would still be in that tank.  
  
Opening his eyes again, he steps around her so that he’s at Roxas’s side. Without even asking—without even knowing—Roxas wraps his hand around Axel’s and tugs him closer until their sides are brushing. Aerith frowns at their hands for a moment, cocking her head. “Where...?”  
  
“He saved me,” Roxas growls. “Rescued me from the humans, and he’s mine now. You can’t have him.”  
  
She stares at him, uncomprehending, before bursting into laughter. Axel glances at Roxas, who looks helpless, like he doesn’t know what to do. After calming herself, Aerith steps closer to them, her spine straight and her shoulders back. “It’s been so long since I’ve seen another of our kind. I’d forgotten how territorial we tend to be.”  
  
She looks at Axel fondly, pulling a photo out of her pocket and offering it to him. “Take it,” she grins. “You have more of a reason to have it than I.”  
  
When he takes the photo, the first thing he notices is how worn down it is—the edges crinkled and fingerprints smudging the images, as if it’s been removed from its hiding place and looked at often. His breath catches when he really looks at it, Zack smiling up at him and Aerith tucked under his arm, grinning at someone just outside of the frame.  
  
“Cloud took that on our fourth date,” she says quietly.  
  
“Why did you stop coming then? If you kept seeing him?” he asks, tucking the photograph into his pocket.  
  
Aerith smiles sadly and shakes her head. “I made him a target,” she whispers. “Didn’t you ever wonder why those people attacked you that night? They were looking for me. I tried so hard to distance myself—only seeing him when it was safe, and it didn’t even matter. They found you anyway.”  
  
“Who did?”  
  
She stares at him for a moment before her smile fades. “He caught me once, you know, and Zack got me out. He saved me,” she says, nodding at Roxas. “Zack saved me like your human saved you, and even then, we couldn’t see each other. I couldn’t see him, and I couldn’t go back to the sea.”  
  
“But what was his _name_?” Axel hisses, fingers tightening around Roxas’s.  
  
She looks away from them, at a vendor passing too close. When she looks back, her eyes are wet again. “His name was Mr. Rose,” she breathes, and Axel’s world grinds to a stop.  
  
.  
  
Later, before they leave her, she pulls him aside and out of Roxas’s earshot. Roxas paces the alleyway restlessly, glaring at them every couple seconds. “He’s using you, you know,” she whispers. “I’ve seen so many of our kind do this to humans—I can’t let it happen to you.”  
  
Axel shakes his head. “He’s not.”  
  
“Because he loves you, right? That’s how we work—we reel you in and make you love us until you think of nothing else, and then we drag you down with us. It’s a game—one that we always win.”  
  
He scowls at her. “Well, what were you and Zack then?”  
  
Her eyes soften, cool green peering down at the sidewalk. “It started like that. I found him in that cove of yours and I thought, ‘This man is going to be my first.’ My mouth watered when I thought of making him love me and then ripping him apart. But—I met you and Reno, his best friend Cloud, and when I went missing, he came looking for me. He saved me, even knowing what I was. And—I loved him for that.”  
  
“Then who are you to say that we are any different?” When she just shakes her head, he sighs, setting out across the cobblestone and back to where Roxas is still pacing at the mouth of the alley.  
  
“Axel?”  
  
He turns, and she’s watching him, her mouth slanted in a crooked smile. “You look like him,” she calls. “Like Zack. Seeing you... it was like seeing a part of him I never thought I’d see again. Just, be careful, okay? For Zack.”  
  
He nods and leaves her standing there.  
  
.  
  
When they get back to the hotel, Roxas turns to him and demands to know everything.  
  
Axel tells him, plucking at the bracelet on his wrist over and over and over—  
  
.  
  
“We should have made him suffer,” Axel tells him later, when they’re sitting together in a quiet pub on the other side of the city. It’s late enough that the moon is hanging heavy in the sky, casting a soft glow through the big window next to the door. There’s a group of people standing there, laughing—their drinks sloshing out of their glasses and moonlight in their hair. It’s a pretty sight—happy—and Roxas thinks that he doesn’t want to hurt any of them. He was right, when he told Axel that their kind was catching.  
  
He nods, taking a long swig of his beer. It isn’t the worst human invention, but it’s still pretty damn terrible. “We should have,” he says, leaning into Axel. He feels tired, his stomach cramping with hunger, and he doesn’t care. He just wants to take Axel back to their hotel room and sleep.  
  
His legs itch. He’s too used to them by now—he’s almost forgotten what it feels like to be in his true form—the water swirling around him.  
  
“There were more important things to consider, though,” he sighs, and threads his fingers together with Axel’s beneath the counter. Axel turns to him, confusion on his face.  
  
“Escape was more important,” he says, and it feels like a lie on the back of his tongue. “ _You_ were important,” he amends, quietly, like he’s giving the air another secret to hold. He squeezes Axel’s hand and finishes his beer in one go. After a moment, Axel squeezes back.  
  
.  
  
They pick an older man who is trying to hide a wedding ring on his pudgy finger as he hits on Roxas—just another messy drunk looking for a good time. When Axel reappears at Roxas’s shoulder, he doesn’t even flinch, just starts making passes at him too.  
  
They lead him into the alleyway next to the pub, and Roxas pulls out all the stops—even going so far as to hum a few bars of the song they’re playing into his ear—but it feels hollow.  
  
When they get him out there, he fumbles for his belt, fingers clumsy with drink, and by the time he gets his belt unbuckled, Roxas has had enough.  
  
He stands back and watches Axel work—watches the blade that Axel had strapped to his ankle slash across the man’s throat, painting the wall with spatters of red. The man gurgles, clutching at his throat, his pants slipping down to his ankles. There’s a can of accelerate on the ground that they’d left here earlier, and Roxas takes his time to douse the man with it. He sputters as some of it splashes into his mouth, still grasping at his ruined throat.  
  
All that’s left is to light the match, so they do.  
  
A match is struck, and the spark catches.  
  
They watch him burn until his fingers stop twitching, and when they get back to the hotel, Axel pins Roxas to the wall, hoisting him up until Roxas’s legs lock around his hips. He fucks him there—deep, bruising thrusts that make Roxas cry out against Axel’s neck.  
  
It’s desperate, hard, and fast, and it hurts.  
  
He doesn’t care. They’re hurting—what does a little bit more matter?  
  
Axel comes with a sob, buried inside of Roxas so deep that he can almost feel it. They breathe quietly in the silence, still joined together, Axel’s face buried in Roxas’s hair. He’s still clutching tight to Roxas’s hips, knuckles gone white, and Roxas knows that he will wake up with fingerprints there tomorrow.  
  
“I think I love you,” Axel murmurs, pressing a kiss to the top of his head. Roxas’s heart misses a beat, and when it kicks back up, it’s racing.  
  
“I know,” he whispers, stroking the tendrils of sweaty red hair away from Axel’s neck.  
  
When Axel drops to his knees, Roxas closes his eyes and thinks ‘Guilt is a human dilemma.’  
  
.  
  
Twilight Town is nothing like the way he remembers it. The train is still there—the clock tower too. The whole place is just as warm and lively as it used to be, warm orange light casting shadows across the streets, friendly residents waving to them as they pass. Roxas knows without even having to ask him that this place is off limits—there will be no prey here—so they have lunch at a local eatery that Axel remembers from when he and Reno came here with Zack. There are kids drawings tacked to a portion of the wall—and to his surprise, his and Reno’s drawing is still there. It was just the one picture, both of them fighting for the crayon until Zack took it away from them and added his own touch.  
  
It’s of their cove, the little house creaking and swaying on its stilted legs—the dock where their little boat was always tethered. There are four stick figures standing proudly in front of the surf—his and Reno’s hair done in a deep, fire-engine red and Zack and their mother’s scribbled in black.  
  
Roxas hovers over his shoulder, concerned, and it’s he who removes the picture—folding it carefully and tucking it into Axel’s pocket.  
  
After that, eating is a quiet affair. They both get fish and chips, and even if Roxas pushes his fries in Axel’s direction, he doesn’t complain once about the fish not being fresh enough.  
  
.  
  
On their way to the train station, they stop by the clock tower. Roxas squints at it, shielding his eyes from the sun. He grins at Axel, nudging his shoulder. “Hey, wanna go up there?”  
  
Axel’s eyes widen. “Up _there_?” he asks incredulously, voice rising to something that he’ll never admit is a squawk.  
  
“Well, yeah.”  
  
Axel stares at him for a few seconds before his shoulders slump. “Sure, why not?”  
  
.  
  
Unsurprisingly, the top of the Clock Tower is _very_ high up. They have to creep past security guards to get there, muffling giddy laughter into each others shoulders. Now that they’re here, Roxas is actually a little bit green from the height. “If you were scared of heights, why the hell did you suggest it?” Axel asks as Roxas rounds the corner carefully.  
  
“Well, I didn’t know that I was scared of heights when I suggested it, now, did I?” Roxas growls, carefully not looking at the ground.  
  
Axel laughs, and Roxas is almost around the corner when he bumps into someone—flailing backwards, arms windmilling wildly before Axel catches him, reeling him in so that his nose is pressed into his chest. “Oh my god, oh my god, oh my _fucking_ god,” Roxas is chanting before he realizes that Axel is talking to someone.  
  
“—at the fuck are you doing up here? You could have killed him!”  
  
And then, a voice that makes Roxas’s heart stop.  
  
“Us? What the hell are you doing up here? Blondie there could have killed him!”  
  
Carefully, he peels away from Axel’s chest and glances up at...  
  
Riku.  
  
Definitely Riku.  
  
His hair is still the same white as it was the last time Roxas had seen him, and his green eyes are narrowed, teeth bared in a growl. And in _his_ arms, in nearly a mirror of the way Axel had been holding him is...  
  
“Sora,” he whispers, voice trembling as he takes in the wild brown hair tucked up beneath Riku’s chin. At his voice, Riku’s eyes widen, and the line of Sora’s back stops trembling, going utterly still.  
  
When his brother turns to face him, his eyes are wide and blue and so very _Sora_ that Roxas thinks he’s dreaming—that he’s finally gone crazy, because here is his brother, at the top of a tower in a town he’s never been to—miles away from Destiny Islands, and it’s _Sora._  
  
“Roxas!” Sora cries, flinging himself forward and into Roxas’s chest hard enough that Axel grunts, rocking back on his heels as he tries to keep them all from going over the side.  
  
“We looked everywhere for you,” his brother sobs, rubbing his face into Roxas’s neck.  
  
Slowly, Roxas wraps his arms around him, burying his nose in his brother’s hair and breathing in _home._  
  
.  
  
They sit on the edge of the Clock Tower as Roxas explains things to Axel, his brother tucked close to his side. Riku still hasn’t said much, rubbing circles into Sora’s back as they talk, exchanging stories.  
  
“Kairi’s back at home, because she doesn’t like heights, but we’ve been coming here for the last few months—the sunset is really gorgeous here. We love it.”  
  
Roxas watches his brother, who is gesturing wildly and kicking his legs out over the open air in a way that speaks of familiarity.  
  
“We’ve been looking for you, Roxas,” he repeats, eyes sad. “I couldn’t find you for so long. I thought you were dead.”  
  
Sora’s skin is tanned, his hands rough with calluses. Roxas wonders when he was last home.  
  
As he speaks, Roxas stares at him, his stomach like lead. When was the last time that Sora was in his true form? When did he become this reliant on his little human playmates? How—when was the last time he felt the waves?  
  
He’s made the land his _home_ as surely as it once was the sea.  
  
Axel is quiet at his side, and when Roxas turns to look at him, he’s staring at the ground so far beneath them, legs kicking against the brick.  
  
“And then—Roxas?”  
  
Roxas looks at his brother and thinks, ‘I was his anchor to the sea. Without me, he just left.’  
  
His brother made his own home. Now Roxas has to make his.  
  
He grins at Sora and climbs to his feet, tugging Axel up with him. “I’m sorry—I really am. I love you, but there’s something that Axel and I need to do.”  
  
Sora’s staring at him like he’s crazy, but he gets to his feet as well, a familiar pout chasing its way across his features. Roxas laughs and bumps their shoulders together. “Don’t worry, we’ll be back. We can go swimming. But... we really need to do something.”  
  
He wraps his brother up in one last hug. “Meet us here tomorrow at sunset, okay? We’ll talk then.”  
  
And because he never said it enough before—“I love you, okay? I missed you every day.”  
  
He pulls away, still grinning, and tugs Axel towards the door. “What are you doing?” he’s growling. “Roxas!”  
  
He laughs again, chest light. “Tomorrow at six! Don’t forget!”  
  
They have a train to catch.  
  
.  
  
They take the train down to the cove, Axel’s heart beating out of his chest until Roxas curls his hand over it—gentle—and tells him that it’s distracting. So Axel tucks his hand on top of Roxas’s and leaves it there, feeling his heart slow beneath their joined palms.  
  
.  
  
The house is still there.  
  
No one lives there, so Axel’s slightly surprised that it’s still standing. He stands in front of it for too long, listening to the scream of the gulls and the crash of the waves against the sand, unwilling to climb the mostly rotted wooden stairs. He stares at it until Roxas presses up against his back and wraps his arms around his waist.  
  
“Why don’t we go for a swim first?” he whispers into Axel’s hair.  
  
Axel shakes his head. “If I’m ever going to do this, it has to be now.”  
  
The living room is covered in dust—the ugly plaid monstrosity his mother called a couch a shrine to the dust bunnies. Someone took it upon themselves to clean the blood from the carpet, and Axel thinks of Aerith and her flower cart—thinks of “Take care of yourself, for Zack,” and feels like crying. The stairs leading to the upstairs bedroom still creak in the same places, and he has to step around the place that he once saw Reno, as if his ghost is still there, lying in the same spot.  
  
Roxas climbs the stairs with him, the quiet puffs of breath against Axel’s neck grounding him.  
  
His and Reno’s room is tidier than it was that night, just a single fire truck in the middle of the floor, like a relic to the past. He bypasses that room completely,  heading for Zack’s, except once he’s there, he doesn’t know what to do. He stands in the doorway, staring at the outdated computer on his desk and the dirty clothes on his floor. There’s a very faint imprint on one side of the bed, and he thinks of Aerith again, coming here time and time again just to linger in Zack's scent.  
  
Biting his lip, he crawls into Zack’s closet and presses his nose to the suits still hanging there—moth-eaten and falling apart.  
  
It’s only when Roxas crawls in after him, wrapping warm arms around his shoulders that the tears come.  
  
Roxas rocks him through it.  
  
He laughs brokenly against Roxas’s shoulder, and wonders how Aerith ever thought that Roxas didn’t love him.  
  
.  
  
Afterwards, when the sun is setting, Roxas wades into the water—lets it slosh around his hips and turns to Axel with a grin and an outstretched hand.  
  
“Race you to the sandbar?” he laughs.  
  
Axel grins.  
  
He goes.  
  
.  
  
(Destiny Islands is lovely—white sands and clear blue water as far as the eye can see. Roxas grips his hand, and Axel thinks of a story he once heard.)


End file.
